


fools who run their mouths off

by scioscribe



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, On Hiatus, Pining, Romance, Slow Build, Witness Protection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-05-18 23:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5947539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alexander Hamilton was that rarity of rarities—a legitimate innocent bystander—but also a journalist who had not so much “witnessed” illegal activity as “screamed in its face.”</p><p>“Wait,” Burr said.  “He live-tweeted the cops putting Seabury in cuffs?”</p><p>(Or, the one where Alexander Hamilton is a witness in need of protection and Burr has just lost a very crucial coin toss.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. what's your name, man?

**Author's Note:**

> [ossapher](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ossapher/pseuds/ossapher) opened the door for a Witness Protection AU, and she and [herowndeliverance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/pseuds/herowndeliverance) have kindly listened to my random excerpts and theorizing about all this. Many thanks to them, and also to my Tumblr followers for encouraging me to start posting this, and to everyone who liked the first thousand words of this when I posted it there a week or so ago. It takes a village, and you all make a great village.
> 
> Hamilton/Burr is our main feature here, but we also have past Burr/Theodosia, and background (non-concurrent) Hamilton/Laurens and Hamilton/Maria. Characters will be added to the tags as they begin to be more prominently featured.

Later, Burr would think: _I flipped a coin for you._

Partnerships settled into rhythms, like dance patterns painted on the floor, and after three years, Burr and Angelica knew their positions and their steps by heart; he knew when she needed three sugars in her coffee instead of two, he knew which color Post-It to use for Eliza’s messages and which to use for Peggy’s, he knew the surest sign of her stress was the way her fingers flexed against her knees like restless spiders. She knew when to stand next to him and not touch him at all and when to let just their shoulders brush against each other, the leather of her jacket against the wool of his.

For sure, they knew which of them would take which witness, unless, as it happened, it was a Tuesday (Burr’s day), rainy (Angelica’s day), and the witness was a clusterfuck of elaborations and caveats. That rarity of rarities—a legitimate innocent bystander—but also a journalist who had not so much “witnessed” illegal activity as “screamed in its face.”

“Wait,” Burr said. “He _live-tweeted_ the cops putting Seabury in cuffs?”

“And then he storified it. Oh, Burr, you’re going to _love_ this guy. They should change his name to, I don’t know, Stephen Thomas Francis Upshaw, or something, just to make his initials be STFU. He’s your worst nightmare.”

“Maybe he could be your worst nightmare instead?” Burr said hopefully.

“No way. You know I hate the innocent ones. All they do is bitch and whine.”

“Fine.” He kept a little bit of loose change in his top left drawer, normally, but they’d had a skinny, bruise-eyed kid of a criminal witness in the week before, and Burr had spent the day teaching her to play Sudoku and buying her snacks from the vending machine, like six dead hours in a marshal way-station, a pack of s’mores Pop Tarts, a sleeve of cold pre-popped popcorn, an almond Hershey bar, and two Sprites would really take the fear and hunger out of her. Pretty much, assessed coldly, a waste of money. All he had left was a penny. But that would work. “We’ll flip for it.”

“You can’t flip a penny.”

“The expression is ‘flip a coin.’ A penny is a coin. It’s about heads or tails, not the denomination.”

“Teeny-tiny surface. You’re not even going to have enough room to really flick it.”

“Fine. You do it, and I’ll call it.”

“Understand,” Angelica said, straight-faced, “that your hands are perfectly delicate enough for most of this job, but there are some things you’re just not up for.” She lined the penny up on the edge of her thumbnail. “Do me a favor and don’t try to call it in the air. Remember last time?”

“I was _trying to make up my mind_.”

“You said, ‘h—t—’ and then made a sound like a radiator on the fritz, and it was deeply strange. I’m trying to save you from yourself. You can call it once it’s back on my hand.” The coin was up and then down against the back of her hand again before Burr could even blink. She put her fingers over it. “Heads or tails.”

“Heads,” Burr said. “No, wait. Tails.”

“You really need to talk to a psychiatrist about this. _Heads_ or _tails_?”

“Heads.”

Angelica lifted up her hand. “Tails. Thanks, penny.” She air-kissed it and then laid it against his cheek and let it fall down into his hand. “I’m still here if you need any help.”

“I need help,” Burr said plaintively as she walked away.

No dice.

It didn’t matter. Whatever he _felt_ about it was irrelevant—he’d always been able to tell what would have consequences and what wouldn’t. He minimized the unexpected. It didn’t matter if things went smoothly or not as long as they went predictably, and within whatever parameters he’d established for them. The job wasn’t a problem. Witnesses lied, but he expected that; they broke the rules, but he expected that too.

(A few months into their partnership, Angelica had told him that the other marshals called Burr “the Terminator.”

“As long as Jefferson doesn’t call me that, that’s fine,” Burr said. He was trying to be pragmatic. He would have preferred that she not think of him that way, either—he liked her, and he didn’t want to be that person to her, that non-person—but it seemed like too much to pin his hopes on for her like him, too, so that was fine. It didn’t matter. He had been perfectly amiable with all his partners and he was amiable with Angelica.)

It didn’t matter that he’d drawn the obnoxious, arrogant, loudmouthed bother. He could cope.

He put the file under his arm and went into the conference room, where the bother himself was huddled up almost defensively at the end of the long table, his fingers jittering like he was playing the piano—no, Burr corrected himself instantly. Like he was typing. The pictures in his file had done him a crooked kind of justice—they had looked good, that was, and he looked good—but seeing him now, Burr thought that in a way he would have been better served by a cartoon, something where an artist could have drawn motion lines around him, because the fidgeting seemed not only characteristic but also somehow _essential_. Though—what the hell did he know? He’d just met the guy.

“Aaron Burr,” he said.

“Deputy US Marshal Aaron Burr.”

“Sure,” Burr said, with a smile. “If you want to be formal. What’s your name, man?”

“I’m kind of thinking that’s got to be in my file.”

“You should practice saying it,” Burr said gently. “It’s not going to get any easier if you don’t.”

The guy evaluated him and then gave a small, ironic wave. “Alexander Hamilton.”

Interesting. Burr would’ve thought he would have already pruned it down to Alex, but then again, maybe not: he had the look of someone who’d want a name that had once conquered the world.

“Are you related to the Burr who—”

“I’m related to all of them,” Burr said.

Hamilton snapped his fingers. “I remember you! Didn’t you graduate Princeton at, like, sixteen?”

“Nineteen,” Burr said dryly. “Much less impressive.”

“That’s not really early enough to be called a prodigy,” Hamilton said, and, because Burr had never thought of himself that way, and because Hamilton still sounded amusingly enough like a cross between a fifties screwball-comedy reporter and an awestruck fan, he didn’t realize the possible implied diss until Hamilton abruptly colored up, fawn skin flooding with dark pink. “I don’t mean that you weren’t.”

“It’s fine. I wasn’t.”

“It’s a good thing _you_ don’t have to be anonymous.”

“This conversation doesn’t actually happen a lot,” Burr said, although it had happened before, and even once would have been one time too many. “I’d rather talk about our plans to keep _you_ anonymous, though, if you don’t mind.”

“Pseudonymous.”

“Sorry?”

“Pseudonymous,” Hamilton said again, and this time he had a little grin on his face that made Burr’s stomach sink. “Anonymous is no identity; pseudonymous is a fake identity. I’m Alexander Hamilton.”

“And Alexander Hamilton is supposed to be a low-key kind of person,” Burr said carefully.

“I tend to favor the really high keys.”

 _Which is why we’re meeting_ , Burr thought. _Because you high-keyed your way right into the middle of the highest-profile crime empire case of the decade, if not the century. And then you wouldn’t shut up about it._

But everything in his file indicated that Hamilton was smart, even if he wasn’t wise. He knew the situation he was in: if he didn’t, all he had to do was look around at the taupe walls and the green-and-vanilla linoleum that made up every government building Burr had ever been in, and _then_ he would know. Burr had to be patient with him. His life had cracked down the middle and Burr was meeting him right on the dividing line between before and after. This was his last chance to strut before he’d have to learn to spend the rest of his life dancing to somebody else’s tune.

So he smiled. “Let’s talk about you.”

“Me or— _me_?”

“Get used to there being only one you.”

“Hamilton.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” A tiny indentation appeared between Hamilton’s eyebrows. “I’m from Nevis, in the West Indies, but I moved to the States when I was seventeen.”

“Wait,” Burr said, double-checking that. He was right. “How the hell did you convince them to fake immigration papers? More to the point, _why_?”

“I’m _not_ from America,” Hamilton said, with just a trace of steely-edged impatience, the kind that said that he felt about this conversation the same way Burr felt about talking about _his_ past. “Not originally. I’m fine with changing my story, but there’s a difference between changing it and erasing it. This history was a compromise. The old me was from Puerto Rico by way of St. Croix by way of Miami, so all of those were out, which I personally have some opinions about, and they ended up going with Nevis because, and I quote, ‘nobody knows where the fuck Nevis is.’”

“It’s in the West Indies,” Burr said, “and more generally, in the Caribbean. So is Puerto Rico, I’ll grant you, but that doesn’t mean the ethnology’s the same.”

“I tried to explain that. They were very white.”

“Well, luckily, so is upstate New York. Hopefully you won’t get too many questions. No reason your folks couldn’t have moved to Nevis, but if you ad-lib, be consistent: people might compare notes. Your family?”

“Dead.”

“Leave room for cousins,” Burr said. “Cousins and college roommates. It’s good cover for us if we have to intervene.”

“Fine,” Hamilton said graciously. “You can be my college roommate. You look like somebody who would have, I don’t know, stuck a chore wheel on the wall or something.”

“It was a chart.”

Hamilton smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and it somehow persuaded Burr to add:

“But you can tell people it was a wheel, if you want.”

“I _do_ want.”

Burr looked down. “Okay. Educational background.”

“Princeton.”

“We can’t fake a Princeton degree.”

“ _You_ went to Princeton.”

“I _actually_ went to Princeton.”

“How would we have roomed together if we didn’t even go to the same school?” Hamilton said, reasonably enough—or actually not reasonably enough, now that Burr thought about it.

“Where did you _really_ go to school?”

“Princeton, like my good friend and roommate Aaron Burr.”

“Hamilton—”

“ _Alexander Hamilton_ went to Princeton.”

“So help me God—”

“Columbia,” Hamilton said. “I’ll take pity on you. But you were the one who said I had to start thinking of myself as one person. And if I can’t tell people I’m from _Puerto Rico_ , I sure as shit can’t tell them I went to _Columbia_.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Burr said. His jaw felt like a mousetrap waiting to snap down. “I’ll see what I can do to get you Princeton paperwork. Buy something orange. What did you study?”

“Political science.”

Acceptable. His real majors had been journalism and history, per his file, but he seemed sharp enough to have picked up enough about politics through both of them to make the lie plausible. And he would read more—that wasn’t a compliment but a dispassionate assessment. His whole life had been torn down to the ground—not even stripped for parts, but with every detail painstakingly swapped out. His head would be spinning. He’d read. What else would there be for him to do?

Burr closed the file. “Are you nervous?”

“I’ve started my life over before,” Hamilton said. His mouth looked narrower, all of a sudden, but it took a moment for Burr to realize that he wasn’t really smiling anymore, just—pressing his lips together. Something Burr knew best from the inside-out. And he knew what it meant, even if he never let himself really think about it. It was okay for Hamilton to feel that way, though. He had plenty of reasons to be afraid.

“I’ll help you get moved in. We bought the house furnished, but you’ve got a stipend, and nobody expects you to find work right away or even start looking for it—take some time and pick out some stuff for yourself, something that’ll make the place feel like home. We can talk about career options, getting to know people, whatever you want. I’ll come by every day for a while, or every other day, if you want some time off from me, then once a week, then every other week, every month. It’ll get easier. And you can always call.”

Hamilton’s chin dipped down slightly. “How many of us do you handle?”

“Witnesses?”

“I know you can’t give me names or locations or anything—”

Burr nodded. “Nineteen.”

“Twenty now.”

“No,” Burr said. “I was already counting you.”

Hamilton looked like witnesses—the good ones, anyway—always looked when Burr gave them something, at once baffled and overwhelmed. Only usually he was giving them car keys, house keys, wifi routers, fake diplomas, or digitally-altered family portraits, not just telling them his duty roster.

“Don’t worry,” he said, trying to puzzle out Hamilton’s expression. “They arrange things carefully so we don’t get overwhelmed. Plenty of people handle more than I am right now, no hiccups at all. You’re my primary focus while we get you settled—I never take on more than one newbie at a time. I won’t lose track of you.” He cleared his throat. “Did they go over the rules with you?”

“Somewhere between giving me a Scottish name and a West Indian backstory, yeah.” Just like that, Hamilton was relaxed again: all to the good, even if Burr still didn’t really understand him. “No contact with anyone from my past.”

“That’s the big one. Is it going to be a problem?”

“Does anyone ever say yes to that?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I don’t have anyone in my past,” Hamilton said. “I make enemies, not friends.” It had the feel of a rehearsed line—Burr knew rehearsed lines—somehow more than anything he’d said about his manufactured background. Like he’d spent years telling himself this in consolation. Like a lengthy list of people he’d riled up, angered, and set against him was just as significant, and just as worthy, as anyone’s signed yearbook.

What had been Burr’s version of that? _It’s who you know, not how well you know them._

Burr decided to let it go. “You can’t publish either.”

“Of course I can publish.”

“You really can’t,” Burr said.

“Salman Rushdie published.”

“Salman Rushdie wasn’t in WITSEC.”

“I’ll use a pseudonym. I’m a good writer.”

“Sure, I’ve read you,” Burr said. “Your skill’s undeniable. But it’s also recognizable. Can I be blunt? Has anyone told you yet that nobody who’s followed the rules of witness protection has ever been found out?”

“So many times I’m surprised you haven’t put it up in Latin over the front door.”

“The building’s incognito,” Burr said. “But yeah, we say it a lot. We say it to emphasize the corollary: _fools who run their mouths off wind up dead_.”

Hamilton just sat there, tensed forward, the red back in his face. He must have gotten into some fights as a kid, even as short as he was: he had that bantamweight, forward-on-his-toes look to him. With that mouth, he could have talked his way out of any fight, too, so it was just a waste of a good skill-set.

“You can back out of the program anytime you want. People have. But some of those people have also died, and none of those people had George King looking for them.” He’d seen the text—the screenshot of it, anyway—and it was as incongruously cute as King himself, with its bright red heart emoji stamped on the end of it like a stray drop of blood: _I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love. <3_

“George King is in jail awaiting trial,” Hamilton said, voice almost cutesy, like he thought Burr was just that much of an idiot.

Burr just looked at him. Hamilton blinked first.

“Fine,” he said sourly. “But I’m not willing to concede this yet.”

Intransigence he could deal with, and had. “Fine. Give it three months and we’ll talk then.” This created the illusion, he knew, that in three months there was the possibility of his response somehow being different. He’d burn that bridge when he came to it. In the meantime, it at least gave Hamilton the idea that they were compromising, and it did seem to perk him up, which Burr refused to feel guilty about.

“I can do three months. Probably.”

“I’ll ignore that last part.” Burr held up the key ring. “Do you want to move in today?”


	2. in new york you can be a new man

Burr always took Angelica with him to pick out the houses. On his own, he got looks, and he was careful of them: he still remembered Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard professor and the face of a couple of different PBS shows, getting busted by the cops for busting through his own jammed front door. He and Angelica were at least normalcy in numbers.

“I don’t know why you spread them out like this through a dozen of these podunk little towns,” she’d said. “I like mine in a cluster. I’m planning a soap opera about them, you know, like what’s going to happen if the money-launderer ends up in a torrid affair with the former drug mule?”

“Kids with poor impulse control and no ability to make good decisions,” Burr said.

She smiled, then tapped her fingernails against the steering wheel as the car in front of her registered the change in speed limits: Angelica once told him she felt like she could run faster than forty miles an hour. “It’s not hard for you?”

“Driving back and forth between towns? I’m not usually moving right from one to the other.”

“Yeah, I know, you’re the king of staggered check-ins, I’ve seen your passive-aggressively shared Outlook calendar. I mean does it bother you, like, looking at houses with me.”

“Ah,” Burr said.

“I’m sorry. That was a stupid question.”

“It’s been four years.”

“You know what?” Angelica said. “I don’t really need another weird memo from you on how we could all improve our scheduling skills as much as i need Aaron Burr’s classic guide to non-answers.”

“So you’re apologizing for asking a question and then criticizing how I answer it.”

“I’m multifaceted. –Fuck, asshole, can you not even go forty-five? You’re a white guy in a grey sedan, _why_ are you this worried about speeding? It’s un-American.”

Burr understood that for the olive branch it was. He also understood that he could have returned it—that, on some level, she who had sisters and a brother, who had always held toys and secrets in common, was waiting for him to say, _It’s not hard in the way that you think. Theodosia and I never looked at houses together—she kicked her husband out and moved me in. So it’s not walking around with you talking about the size of the kitchen, or how much yard there is. It’s when somebody calls you my wife._

Instead, he said, “What an asshole,” like he could tie himself to her not by revealing himself at all, but by agreeing, really, that people should go faster.

Although Burr himself never went above the posted limit.

But he had reason to be thankful for three years of car small-talk with Angelica that mostly consisted of badmouthing other drivers, because he had nothing else to say to Hamilton except, “Did you see him try to turn left in front of that ambulance?”

“Asshole,” Hamilton agreed. “On a related note, why are we progressing toward our destination more slowly than the gradual heat death of the universe?”

Fine. He could be like that if he wanted. “I think you’ll like your new house,” he said with false brightness.

“I liked my old house,” Hamilton said. “But, hey, that’s probably just because I got to pick it out and tell my loved ones where it was. I’m sure this house will be cool too, though.”

“There’s another thing,” Burr said, ignoring him. “I got you a storage unit across town. Steve’s Long-Term. Unit twenty-six. You’ll have to remember that, but you seem like you’d have a good memory.”

Hamilton tilted his head back, like it was a punch and not a compliment that Burr had landed on him, like he thought he would have taken the punch better, all things considered. He was quiet.

“Just a futon and some blankets, a fridge, microwave—the unit has electricity, though I wouldn’t want to plug too much in. And a disposable cell phone in a shoebox. It’s your safety net in case you ever need it. You won’t. But if you do, you call me from that number, and I’ll come right away.”

“Okay. Thanks for the bomb-shelter slash fuck-pad.”

“I don’t usually espouse an opinion on this kind of thing,” Burr said, “but you could not get laid in that room. No one could.”

“Ned said—” Hamilton closed his mouth and turned to look out the window. A car whipped by them. “ _Asshole_.”

“Asshole,” Burr agreed, because he remembered this, that feeling in his heart that was so sharp it was almost like a snakebite, the feeling that said, _You will never see them again_. He was glad that, after Theodosia, he was numb from it. A perfect circle of scar tissue inside his chest. He found their turn and pulled off. Leafy green streets went unappreciated by them both. He wondered if Ned had been Hamilton’s boyfriend. Not that there was any reason to care. Boyfriend, girlfriend, old friend: Hamilton had been relieved of all of them.

“This is you,” he said, turning the car into the driveway. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s a real estate principle: buy the worst house in the best neighborhood you can afford.”

“This is the best neighborhood we could afford?”

Good, the snark was back: he’d rather deal with that than the grief. “Sure. The Mint’s the only part of the US Government that’s made of money.”

“You have a terrible sense of humor,” Hamilton said.

“I borrowed it.”

“Your sense of humor?”

“The joke.” It was one of Madison’s, worth remembering only because Jefferson had laughed at it.

“Give it back as soon as possible,” Hamilton advised, unclicking his seatbelt. But on second thought, Burr thought he would hold onto the joke a little longer, because even with Hamilton’s head turned to look at the house, Burr could see the notch of a dimple the smile had made near his mouth.

“Come on. We’ll get you settled.”

“Is that my car?”

“Do you like it?” Burr asked, which was a pointless question. The title was already in Hamilton’s name whether he liked it or not.

“Kind of, actually? But it’s purple.”

“My boss picks out all the vehicles, and he’s a man of colorful tastes. But it should be a good ride, because he also never met a luxury feature he didn’t want to tack on. Accounting’s given up on him now, they don’t even try. You’re looking at seat-warmers and a heated steering wheel, minimum, which will be good in the cold. You know the kind of weather you’re looking at in a couple of months?”

“I’m aware of the existence of snow,” Hamilton said, with a prissiness that Burr found both amusing and ominous. He made a mental note to warn Hamilton, as they headed into December, to keep some durables on hand and enough gas in the tank of his car.

“Lean on the West Indies thing if you can’t get anyone to clear off your driveway for you. It’ll make your self-pity seem a little more justified. Do _not_ text me a 911 because you forgot to buy a snow shovel.” 

“I wouldn’t do that!”

“Here,” Burr said as he scraped his feet against the welcome mat. He held the keys out to Hamilton and their hands touched, briefly: he neatly tipped the key-ring off his finger and onto Hamilton’s. “It’s your house, not mine. I’m your guest.”

“This isn’t some super-smooth way of telling me you’re a vampire, is it? You’re not going to literally make me invite you in?”

“It’s a gesture.”

“Do people usually respond to that?”

“We don’t need to have this conversation on your front porch,” Burr said quietly, “and people don’t usually respond like _this_.”

“That little finger-touch-key-glide thing,” Hamilton muttered as he unlocked the door and gestured Burr in. “Unbelievable.”

Actually, Burr wanted to say, that part had been an accident, or at least something unplanned; he had just reached out and Hamilton had been there. But it struck him as a needless clarification, especially when there was no guarantee it wouldn’t only rile Hamilton more. He would stick with a litany of Madison’s jokes as more presentable, and reliable, than his actual thoughts.

It was petty to find the light switch before Hamilton did, after his insistence on it being Hamilton’s house, but he was feeling petty.

“What do you think?”

“It’s nice,” Hamilton said. “Yeah.” He did a circuit of it with Burr trailing behind him, ready to defend it, although it didn’t need much defending, except for the olive-green wall-tile in the bathroom, which he couldn’t imagine Hamilton wanting to leave for very long. The furniture had all been chosen for inoffensiveness—sale-ticketed items from the furniture warehouse floor, with a couple of random real estate agent bonuses like a peach throw pillow and a single ivory-painted bookshelf.

Burr had always seen the anonymity of the Witsec houses as a plus—they _chose_ them for that one-size-fits-all vibe, after all—but now, with Hamilton walking through it, he started to see it differently. A lot of beige and taupe. Shelves empty of books. No photographs anywhere. It was a hotel room with no room service, no turn-downs, and no way out.

“You know what we could do?” Burr said easily. “Didn’t I say you’d want to pick out some stuff of your own? I’ll be up here tomorrow anyway. There’s an antique store a half hour west on the highway—a Bed Bath and Beyond—bookstores. Better?”

Hamilton nodded twice and then forced a grin that Burr didn’t have the heart to tell him crossed the thin line between fake and horrific. “Yeah, I like that combination. I want a centuries-old stone moonshine jug, two duvets, and some Alexis de Tocqueville. Not to mention the Princeton gear somebody promised me.”

“I haven’t left your company since I said that,” Burr said. “So unless you thought I kept a Tigers sweatshirt in my glove-compartment—”

“I know it wasn’t as cool as your friend’s US Mint joke,” Hamilton said, “but it _was_ a joke.” He opened one of the kitchen cupboards and his face brightened. “You really did buy this place fully furnished.”

“That was me, actually. I came up yesterday and stocked it. The realtor did leave half a package of cookie dough in the fridge, though—you know how they put a pan of them in the oven for open houses?” More accurately, the realtor had left an opened package of cookie dough in the fridge, but Burr and Angelica between them had winnowed it down. He had liked that, actually: Angelica sitting on the kitchen table with her feet in one of the chairs, peeling off greasy squares of raw dough and passing them to him as he stocked the cabinets and fridge. Her telling him about Peggy’s birthday party.

Hamilton recalled him back to the present: “You bought me groceries?” His voice sounded a little funny. He’d opened the fridge and was looking at the line-up of milk, orange juice, and eggs; the rotisserie chicken shelved next to the tub of pre-made potato salad.

Burr, still distracted, passed the question off to the Terminator subroutine that handled routine questions. “You’re going to feel a little overwhelmed for the first few days. Routine errands—getting patterns established—that can help ease the transition, but we don’t want you going hungry tonight just because you’re not up for a store run yet.”

“Sorry,” Hamilton said, “but can you not do that?”

Burr blinked. “Do what?”

“That thing where you tell me how I’m going to feel.”

“From prior experience—”

“Nineteen people is not a sufficient sample size—”

“I told you,” Burr said levelly. “It’s eighteen people plus you.”

“Then that’s an even smaller sample size!”

“Fine. You’re fine. We’ll have this conversation pretending that you’re fine.” He reached over and tapped the refrigerator door closed.

“I forgot that was open,” Hamilton said. “I wonder how many penguins died during that conversation.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works.”

“Good thing I’m only a fake _political_ scientist, then,” Hamilton said.  


_Okay_ , Burr thought, resignedly, _so we really are having this conversation pretending you’re fine._

“You’ll like it here,” he said. “You can look out the window while you’re cooking.”

Hamilton snorted. “You sound like a real estate agent.” He leaned back against the lip of the counter near the sink and gave Burr the kind of concentration Burr normally associated with Angelica and crossword puzzles, or Jefferson and that phone game with the cats. “So, Princeton.”

“I can prep you with some insider details, but I think it would be best just not to go around telling people where you went to school.”

“In case they poke holes in my story?”

“No, it’ll just make you seem really conceited.”

Hamilton answered that with a half-smile. “I wasn’t really asking for a brochure, anyway. I was just wondering how Aaron Burr, prodigy of Princeton College—”

“We already established I wasn’t.”

“—winds up working for the least-glamorous branch of federal law enforcement? Not that it would make much more sense if you were FBI, really. CIA, maybe.”

“We’re not the least-glamorous,” Burr said. “Name three things the ATF’s done lately that’ve gone well.”

“You can’t even tell people what you do for a living!”

“Neither can the CIA. And I don’t have anyone to tell.”

Hamilton glanced at Burr’s left hand.

Usually, it took witnesses a few weeks to get around to asking him anything personal; after Hamilton had somehow shoved their past selves in a Princeton dorm room together, though, Burr should have gotten ready for it. Hamilton had made his living by asking questions and poking at sore spots. (He’d also, not that he seemed to have internalized this yet, _destroyed_ his living by asking questions and poking at sore spots.)

He meant to say something euphemistic, ambiguous—meant, if it came down to it, to outright lie—but then he heard himself say, “She died,” and his voice sounded absurd, comical in its sudden roughness, like he had a cheese grater inside his throat.

“Oh, shit. I’m sorry, man.” 

Burr was still looking down, but he could see Hamilton hovering in the periphery of his vision, a hummingbird of constant but suspended movement, seemingly weighing whether or not Burr would want, what, a hug? Burr put up a hand so Hamilton would hold his position.

“It’s been four years,” he said, a sentence he’d said so often now—to Angelica, to Madison, Jefferson, to himself—that it felt as well-worn as old denim. Even though it had never really fit him right to begin with. “Stomach cancer. And, in answer to your question before, we’re allowed to tell our spouses, so she knew about me.”

“If you bought me any alcohol,” Hamilton said, “I’d owe you a drink.”

“Top cabinet.”

“That’s where cooking oil goes.”

“See?” Burr said, grateful for the opportunity to move on. “You’re already finding ways of making yourself at home.”

Hamilton went on his toes to reach the bottles. It wasn’t often Burr got a chance to be taller, so he made the most of it: “Want me to help you with that?”

“Just because you’re a widower doesn’t mean you get to be a dick,” Hamilton said, hooking one down. “Okay. You have terrible taste. I don’t even know where to start with this. You’re stocking a house for some random person you’ve never met, and you’re good on the groceries so far, you get all the staples, and then for some reason you buy _fucking chocolate stout_ and nothing else? And then you don’t even refrigerate it?”

“It’s better warm.”

“That’s just not right, Burr,” Hamilton said. He passed off the whole bottle. “Here. Take this with you. I don’t want it in the house.”

Burr accepted it and tucked it under one arm.

Something made him throw Hamilton a bone: “There’s also a six-pack of Guinness under the sink.”

“That’s where the cleaning supplies go!”

“I was _hiding_ it,” Burr said. “The terrible alcohol is an office joke, because ordinarily, the first thing everyone wants to do, in your situation, is get drunk. I’m being descriptive, not prescriptive, in case you’re about to pounce on me for telling you what you’re feeling. They were split in the last poll as to whether it was our duty to facilitate the drunkenness—all part of looking out for you—or stop it—all part of same. The compromise was that we’d buy stuff like this, and if you were desperate enough to drink it, you must really need it.”

“What if I’d just liked chocolate stout?”

“Then you’d have good taste,” Burr said. “We all buy the weird stuff we actually like, so we can take it home if you forfeit it.” Angelica specialized in grapefruit vodka, Madison in strawberry Boone’s Farm, and Jefferson—when he deigned to take on a witness or two of his own—in cans of Bud Light Lime-a-Rita, which no witness in the world had ever been needy enough to accept. “The Guinness I bought out of pity.”

Hamilton unearthed it from behind the kitchen-sized trash bags and separated out two bottles. “Stay?”

Something about his expression was naked.

It was the alcohol question again. What did he do to look after them? Give them a security blanket or insist they sink or swim on their own, at least for a couple of hours?

He had said more about Theodosia in the last fifteen minutes than he’d said in the last year. He just wanted to go home. He’d see Hamilton every day for the next week.

“Sorry,” he said. “Rain check. I’ll come by tomorrow and we can do that shopping we talked about.” He nodded at the beer. “Try to limit yourself. But there’s a pizza in the fridge and you’ve got two weeks of the really good cable on free-trial before we drop you back down to the basics. I’d make the most of it, if I were you.”

Hamilton’s face closed up. He twisted off the bottle cap. “Sure,” he said.


	3. didn't think that you would make it (to be sure)

“I may have fucked something up,” Burr said.

The way their office worked was they were expected to be in the building nine-to-five unless they were out with a witness, the better to sustain the illusion that they made their living doing excruciatingly boring and technical tax consultation that only Madison actually understood. Mostly, Burr read.

That morning, though, he hadn’t been able to concentrate on his book.

Madison had discovered an old Super Nintendo at a garage sale and connected it to the break-room television and he and Angelica had gotten progressively more invested in who would win their game of Super Mario; Burr felt conscience-bound to root for his partner but was mostly in the room because it provided a distraction from his thoughts. He couldn’t arrive at Hamilton’s any earlier than eleven. Hamilton would take it as a vote of no-confidence, surely.

So he meant to watch the game quietly but then, as Angelica’s Luigi was transforming into a raccoon, he said, “I may have fucked something up,” and had to say it a second time, because Angelica and Madison were both very invested in the question of whether the raccoon tail was more or less advantageous than the fireball power.

(Burr had never played and had no opinion.)

Angelica paused the game. “You didn’t kill that whole bottle of chocolate stout in one night, did you?”

“Not that kind of mistake.”

Madison folded his hands over his controller. “Do you want me to go?”

“I’m interrupting you, not the other way around,” Burr said. He was suddenly and acutely aware of being the third person in the room: they were comfortable with each other and he was comfortable with no one, they knew the game and he did not, they were real and he was pretending. “It’s nothing.”

“No, come on,” Angelica said. “What’s up? Is it STFU guy?”

“He wanted me to hang around last night and I left.”

“You have to leave sometime,” Madison pointed out. “You’re going back today, right? There you go.”

Burr nodded, but couldn’t explain what he really meant: that Hamilton was a Rubik’s cube in ceaseless shift and disarray and he had lined up for a moment, his colors bared, only to have Burr turn away. He wasn’t sure he would get another moment like that anytime soon. Burr had always considered himself skilled at establishing trust, at giving advice worth taking, at inculcating the belief—the certainty—that his witnesses could come to him with their worries and fears. The absence of that necessary trust could get Hamilton killed. He knew that, but he’d still walked away. He’d let heartsickness interfere.

“He thought I was treating him like a statistic,” he said, because that was the more minor point and therefore the safer one.

“Technically,” Madison said, “we’re trying to stop them from _becoming_ statistics. If the best way to do that is to make them the average of every data-set, that’s what we do.”

“Within reason,” Angelica said. “Sorry, Jemmy, but you didn’t see STFU’s file.”

“I _can’t_ see his file,” Madison pointed out reasonably enough. “He belongs to y’all.”

“I disclaim all responsibility. He belongs to Burr. But my point is, some people just don’t blend. If you had Jefferson as a witness, what would you do with him?”

“That would be an immense conflict of interest,” Madison said gravely.

“Run,” Burr said. “Retire. Leave the country.”

“You’re both cowards. Come on,” she said, and the appeal was only to Madison, as if Burr’s lack of participation, even in what he’d started, was so foregone a conclusion he wasn’t even really in the room. “You know him best. How do you take Thomas Jefferson, man of a dozen purple silk jackets, man who has never gotten his own cup of coffee, man who has—”

“We’ve met,” Madison said.

“And then you get told: make this guy seem like he could be anybody.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“You _couldn’t_ do that.”

“I could. I wouldn’t choose to.”

No, he wouldn’t. Burr had been there five years ago, after all, when Jefferson had extravagantly squandered two months worth of vacation-time in Paris; he had seen the postcards that arrived each day for Madison and seen Madison start each morning by propping one up against the corner of his monitor with the picture-side in and the Jefferson’s-message side out. He’d had Theodosia, then, so he’d had no envy, but he’d still noticed it. With how he had grown up, he couldn’t not. Once you’d starved, you were ever after aware of banquets.

Madison would never starve; Jefferson wouldn’t; Angelica could never.

“He’s an outlier,” Madison was saying. “He’d be noticeable no matter what, but he’d be more so, at least eventually, if he were unhappy. Paint a tiger black-and-white and he’s not a zebra—if you put him by the watering hole, the ones with any sense will run, any sane observer would still see him, and he’ll have chewed off half his fur. You accommodate the exceptional cases by finding them exceptional circumstances. Is he exceptional, Burr?”

 _Yes_. “He thinks so.”

Madison, their resident expert in dealing with self-proclaimed exceptionalism, shrugged. “Then work with him.”

“It is true that we don’t have what you’d call _a lot_ of work,” Angelica said. “Especially those of us with well-designed Outlook calendars.”

“I find Burr’s calendar invitations very helpful,” Madison said, too straight-faced to be telling the truth.

*

So Burr left early.

He couldn’t shake the memory of the almost uninterrupted parade of neutrals in Hamilton’s house: beige carpeting, taupe walls, khaki upholstery. About all Hamilton had brought from his old life to his new one was the poison-green T-shirt he’d had on when they’d met. He would gravitate towards adding color to the place, Burr could already tell that, but he still felt like he needed to apologize for it. He’d chosen the house, after all. He had seen it half-a-dozen times before he’d handed over the keys, and he hadn’t noticed how _dull_ it was until he’d had Hamilton by his side.

He pulled into a florist’s shop and—hands sweating like he was buying roses, or something else unmistakably frivolous—made a couple of quick, spur-of-the-moment buys and then got back on the road.

The last time he had bought flowers had been Theodosia’s funeral. But those had been roses: roses and lilies. That was completely different.

He thought, _I should send Theo flowers_. He didn’t want her to think of them only as what they gave her mother.

All of this, Burr noted wryly, provided an excellent distraction on his way to Hamilton’s, so he didn’t at any point decide his peace offerings were better suited for the side of the road. He put one pot under one arm and one under the other and, shutting the car door carefully with his foot, proceeded up to the front door and rang the bell with his elbow.

Hamilton pulled the door open at once, which meant—not good—that he’d been on-edge enough that he’d been spooked by the car coming into the drive. Burr knew by now to keep his mouth shut about saying so, but he’d seen this before, down to the dark circles and the bloodshot eyes. Hamilton hadn’t slept. Bluntly, Burr didn’t even think he’d showered.

“Hi,” Burr said, as carefully as if the word could either defuse or trigger a bomb. He held up both hands. “I brought you an orchid and some bamboo.”

Hamilton looked at the plants and then took them and gathered them up towards his chest.

“Housewarming gifts,” Burr clarified. “The orchid’s just to add color,” and he’d chosen a deep, jewel-like purple, since Hamilton had expressed at least a partial fondness for his new car, “and I didn’t know how handy you were with plants, so I got the bamboo. The florist said you’d practically have to take a blowtorch to it to kill it.”

Also, he’d liked how green it was: the orchid for Hamilton’s car, the bamboo for his shirt. It seemed best not to say either part of that.

Burr had learned a long time ago that people didn’t like the way he learned things about them.

He gently steered Hamilton back into the house and shut the door behind him. Locked it, too, in case Hamilton was listening for that. “Let’s get these on a counter or something.”

Hamilton robot-walked towards the kitchen and placed both of them within a couple inches of each other on the table, which Burr approved of—good sunlight—and stood looking at them. He licked his lips.

“Thank you. They’re pretty.”

“No problem.”

“It’s weird how you guys will shell out for flowers but parolees can’t get food stamps.”

“Marshals don't actually head up SNAP, surprisingly enough,” Burr said, which seemed simpler than pointing out either how dazed Hamilton seemed or that he had paid for them out-of-pocket. “Have you had breakfast?”

“Is it morning?”

Burr’s attentiveness shifted into worry, which made the air of the room feel heavier around him, as if he’d have to swim through it to reach Hamilton in time. He listened to the ceiling fan in the living room push the heat around. “It’s ten-thirty. When’s the last time you slept? Not last night, but maybe not the night before either?”

“I’ve been sleeping.”

“Really.”

“I took a nap on the plane.”

“Oh, okay,” Burr said. “Just like the doctor ordered. Come on, let’s get your feet up.”

“You can’t _put me to bed_ , Burr.”

“Of course not. It’s just a little early for lunch, so I thought we could watch some TV. Try out the cable package of yours.” Golf would be too obvious. “Animal Planet.”

“You want to watch Animal Planet.”

“They have a show where they explain the advantages and personalities of different breeds of cats,” Burr said. He waited until Hamilton’s knees were against the couch and then—showing Hamilton his hands first, as if to demonstrate he was unarmed—pushed a little against Hamilton’s shoulders and lowered him down to sit. “That’s on during the day sometimes. We watch it at work.”

“You need a real job.”

“I can already tell you’ll make me work for my money.” Hamilton still had his shoes on: Burr weight his options and then got down on one knee and unlaced them matter-of-factly. He’d done this before, when Theodosia had been pregnant and her feet had been ached all the time. He tapped the backs of Hamilton’s heels. “Out.”

Hamilton kicked them off. “I could have done that. You look like a shoe salesman.”

Hamilton’s socks were green, like the shirt. Burr took a certain amount of pride in that.

He levered himself up, sat down at the other end of the couch, found the remote control, and located Animal Planet. The cat show wasn’t on, but the dog show was. He purposely kept the volume low. He could learn about Irish setters, and Hamilton could sleep. In fact, his eyes were already half-closed.

“I know what you’re doing,” Hamilton said, his lips barely moving. “It’s not going to work.”

“Hush,” Burr said. “Listen to this guy telling us how much exercise setters need. You ever have any dogs?”

“Me or Alexander Hamilton?”

“I think you and Alexander Hamilton can have the same history pet ownership.”

“A mutt.” He’d closed his eyes completely now. “You wouldn’t see her on here. Good dog.”

“What’d you call her?”

“Rosalind,” Hamilton said sleepily. His chin nodded against his chest.

Burr put his hand to his mouth and bit down on his knuckles. “Rosalind?”

“Rosie.” The shift to commercial brought about a sudden increase in volume, and Hamilton’s head bobbed up again like a cork, his eyes once more open. “Stop staring at me.”

“We were talking,” Burr said. “I was being polite.”

“You’re being transparent.”

“You need to sleep, Hamilton.”

Hamilton closed his eyes again, but this time his jaw stayed tight, and Burr could see his eyelids twitch, as if he’d entered a dream. “He said I was sweet, you know.”

Burr looked back at the TV screen, where someone was trying to sell him detergent. Soap ran into water and took all the mud and muck away, which was, he thought, a nice promise to make if you really wanted to sell somebody something. He made a low noise in his throat, a non-committal _mm_ , a blank space for Hamilton to fill in his own question.

“His Majesty,” Hamilton said. “That’s what he had people call him. Pretentious.”

“Mm.”

Hamilton twisted around, and he’d stopped acting like he was asleep, like this conversation was one he was having unconsciously. “Say _something_.”

“Pretentious means he was pretending to something,” Burr said. “Was he? He seemed to have about as much power as the name would imply.”

“Princeton, look at you.”

“The dogs are back on,” Burr said.

“Can I not talk to you?” It was the way he said it that made Burr turn the TV off: he didn’t sound desperate, just resigned. Like he hadn’t expected anything else. Burr really had read some of the articles he’d written in his other life—the articles and the fights Hamilton had gotten into in the comments sections of them. The heat of his confidence had been blistering. He’d taken idiocy as a personal affront. He’d taken _everything_ as a personal affront.

But he was willing to let this happen to him without complaint. He would let Burr say, “Next up are the Shelties,” and they could go from there.

What did he know about this?

He’d sat on the bathroom floor with Theodosia when she’d first gotten her diagnosis: he’d rolled a towel up against the wall for her back, and he’d held her. But that had been his wife.

Angelica had talks with her family sometimes where she barely said a word: just listened, her fingers playing with a pencil or the cord of her desk phone, her gaze far away. It wasn’t, Burr understood, about tigers and zebras at all, it was just about—

He’d already turned the television off.

“You can talk to me,” he said.

“I was undercover. You know that, right?”

“Hunter S. Thompson for the digital age. You would actually not be my first pick for an undercover assignment.”

“Oh,” Hamilton said, with a kind of breathless arrogance, somehow compatible with, and inseparable from, how hollowed-out he looked, “I’m very good.”

“You went undercover with George King.”

“With Seabury. Who, I don’t mind telling you—”

 _And the entire internet_ , Burr thought.

“—is a total fuckwit, like an actual torn condom of a human being. You have to get the order of these things right, Burr. I _demolished_ Seabury and Seabury rolled on King like a puppy for an FBI belly-scratch. The FBI outrank you guys, right?”

Burr had few bedrock convictions, but essentially, _fuck_ the FBI. “No.”

“I met him, though,” Hamilton said, as if Burr hadn’t spoken. “Glittery motherfucker. You’ve seen the pictures. He’s very cute. Like— _Tiger Beat_ for sadists. And he giggles. So, basically, he’s a joke, except you know who he is, you know the kind of power he has, and you think: how much blood’s a guy like this have to walk through before he can afford to give this few fucks what people think of him? He doesn’t have to act tough. He’s all velvet. He’s petulant. And he gets to be, because he gets everything he wants.”

“And he thought you were sweet,” Burr said.

“Sweet,” Hamilton said again, and the word made his mouth pucker, like if he had a mouthful of sugar right then he’d choke on it before he could ever swallow it down. “After Seabury, when he realized who I was, he got my cell phone number.”

“I’ve seen the text.”

“Texts.” Hamilton smiled. “I didn’t tell anybody about the first round. He likes little unicorns. And crowns, he’s big on those, like a signature. _You’ll remember you belong to me_. Little crown. _Now you're making me mad_. Little heart, little unicorn.”

“Did you—” That might not be the right question. “Did he—”

“I could do a lot better than George,” Hamilton said, dismissively enough that Burr felt safe being relieved by it. “But—he fixates on people. He has a lot of money, and a lot of power, and a lot of time, and no sense of proportion.”

And Burr recognized this, of course, because it happened every time, with every witness, but the familiarity of it didn’t make it any more comfortable, because, he thought, this had never happened with Hamilton before. He had never really been here, in this room, at all. He could see the shadows the orchid and the bamboo threw across the kitchen table. Hamilton’s hair had come partly undone from its elastic.

“He’s dangerous,” Burr said.

Hamilton lowered his head just a little, nodding more with his eyes than with anything else.

And Burr turned the TV back on.

He said, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. And I’m right here. Danger would have to get through me first.”

Hamilton breathed out a little through his nose. “Does that really work on people?”

“I don’t know,” Burr said. “I’ve never really said that to anybody before.” He tilted his head. “Thought it would be cheesy.”

“It was. It really, really was.”

“Watch the dogs, Hamilton. Sleep. I’ll stay.”

“You can’t _stay_.”

“Sure I can. I’m all yours.”

“One-twentieth mine.”

“One-nineteenth.”

“Whatever,” Hamilton said. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “You’ll really stay?”

“I’ll really stay,” Burr said, which also sounded cheesy, but which was, at least, something he had said before, even if it hadn’t been on the job: he had made that promise and kept it. Sometimes he felt like it was the only thing he’d ever done right.

Fifteen minutes later, when Hamilton’s breathing evened out, he thought maybe he’d just gotten to a second thing.

*

Hamilton slept open-mouthed on the sofa for nine hours straight before waking up, groggy and hungry, at eight at night. He rolled his head to the side and his neck popped.

“I tried to get you to move,” Burr said, privately amused by Hamilton’s exaggerated grimace at the sound but also privately wishing that Hamilton could have woken up either before _It Happened One Night_ had started or after it ended. “Sometime around two o’clock. You weren’t really a fan of the idea.”

“I don’t remember that at _all_.”

“I’m not surprised.” He watched Clark Gable hang the sheet between his bed and Claudette Colbert’s. “How are you feeling?”

“You switched off the dogs.”

“The dogs were followed by animal rescue operations and a lot of ASPCA ads, all kind of disheartening, so I surfed around. The options being what they were, I learned a lot about woodworking and a little bit about home renovation. And now, Capra. Have you seen it?”

“Wait,” Hamilton said. “ _How_ long are we talking about?”

Burr checked his watch. “Ten past eight now.” He resigned himself to losing the whole second half of the movie: Hamilton, he thought, was probably the kind of person who wouldn’t shut up even in a theater. He turned the TV off. “I’m starving, if you want to go out. Let’s get your bearings in the area a little.” He sniffed, hopefully unobtrusively, and added, “You should shower first, though. No offense.”

Though it didn’t seem to him that any restaurant would decline to seat them. Hamilton, fresh from the first real rest he’d had in God only knew how long, was relaxed, burnished, soft-featured. His hair was a matted mess at the back, though, from how he’d nuzzled into the sofa cushions: Burr reached out to untangle it before he caught himself and folded up his hand into a fist. Hamilton didn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah, okay.” Hamilton’s voice was still thick from sleep. “Check Yelp. Did you buy me towels?”

“In the bathroom closet. They’re beige, though, so don’t drop them anywhere or you won’t find them again.”

Hamilton chuffed out a small laugh. “You’re funnier than that Mint joke led me to believe.”

“I said that one wasn’t mine.”

“You gotta commit enough to be funny on your own,” Hamilton said, and then wandered off down the hallway, his bare feet scraping softly against the carpet. A minute later, Burr heard the hiss of water against the shower floor and started obediently looking at Yelp, and then, more rebelliously, at TripAdvisor. They had options if Hamilton liked Italian or Chinese.

This wasn’t so unusual, he told himself. He’d gone out to eat with witnesses before. After a while, especially, he became just another part of their lives, a long-standing acquaintance, someone they offered little sketches of their lives to while a server brought little bowls of sliced lemons for their tea or extra plastic-wrapped crackers for their salads. Mediocre food in mediocre restaurants with mediocre company—and he was including himself in that. That he found Hamilton interesting—the way a pincushion glittering with pins was more interesting than one without—was irrelevant.

Hamilton came in dressed in sweatpants and the same T-shirt he’d had on before, which would be a problem, vigorously toweling his hair. “And another thing,” he said, like they’d just been talking, “you have been here for _way_ too long.”

“There was no first thing,” Burr said. “The last thing you did before you went in there was ask me where the towels were.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I wasn’t going to leave while you were asleep.”

“Well,” Hamilton said, rubbing his head until his hair stood up all around him and he looked like a shocked porcupine, “I’m not asleep now, so you can go.”

“But now I’m hungry. You slept through lunch.”

“You didn’t have _lunch_?” He sounded horrified, although Burr would have easily placed money on Hamilton being one of those people who constantly forgot to eat. Madison was like that, and Burr and Angelica swapped out whose turn it was to place Powerbars near his mouse-pad, since only Jefferson had the necessary verve to swoop in, gasp in horror at the clock, and demand they all have carbonara immediately. “The kitchen is _right there_.”

“So we’ll have dinner,” Burr said, “at this 4.7 star place, and then I’ll head out, if you want. We can save the shopping for tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Hamilton said, not sounding appeased at all, and he disappeared back into the bedroom.

Twenty minutes passed. Burr thought of broken bedrooms windows, silently picked locks on back doors, people waiting in closets with loops of piano wire, and he said, “Alexander?” and walked halfway down the hall. He kept his hand away from his gun. There seemed a better than even chance Hamilton would explode through the bedroom door any second now, tie half-knotted, hands mid-gesture. _And another thing._

“Alexander?”

He edged the bedroom door open with his foot.

Hamilton lay diagonally on the bed, snoring. That look he’d had before, like he was an oil painting of himself, had left him, along with all his dignity: his mouth was slightly open and he was drooling a little onto the bedspread. Burr snorted.

“Okay,” he said. “Guess that settles that.” He pulled down a corner of the cover and flipped it lightly over Hamilton.

In the kitchen, he cut up the rotisserie chicken and opened up the container of deli green beans. He texted Angelica:

 _still out of the office_  
_not in tomorrow_  
_tell Jefferson everything okay_

She wrote back right away, as if she’d been waiting for him.

_everything okay or everything EXCEPTIONAL? ;-)_

Burr decline to respond, but his phone buzzed again a second later.

 _you’re a good guy_ , Angelica said.


	4. there would have been nothin’ left to do for someone less astute

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The possibility of non-con is raised briefly in this chapter, in a flashback. It does not occur, but the possibility of it is used as a threat.
> 
> I owe ossapher for sending me pictures of an upstate New York antiques store, which served as a partial model for the one in this chapter.

Burr woke up to a series of texts—

 _I have never noticed if you are in office or not so_  
_I do not give a fuck if you are here today_  
_but Angelica seemed to think I should????_  
_idk Burr if you just got laid or something I’m down with that, it’s time_

_…_

_Sorry, man  
I know there’s no clock on this thing._

_…_

_you do you_  
_you protect the shit out of that witness_  
_or get a croissant or whatever_  
_I don’t really know what you do all day_  
_I’m gonna move everything on your desk and see if you notice_  
_love you man_  
_or whatever_  
_does he like the car????_  
_it’s an exceptional vehicle, if I do say so myself_

\--and a very irritable, Bisquick-flecked Alexander Hamilton, who was armed with a spatula and girded with a dishtowel tucked into the waist of his jeans.

“So I’m trying to make you breakfast,” Alexander said, as if in the middle of a story that Burr had simply fallen asleep during eight hours ago, “and your text-tone is loud enough to break apart eggshells _in the kitchen_ and yet you are just _sleeping through it_.”

Burr rolled over onto his side and grabbed the phone and skimmed through them. “It’s my boss.”

“Your boss sounds clingier than Saran Wrap.”

“He has no middle ground,” Burr said, tapping out a quick reply— _the car is great, thanks for the concern, will see you tomorrow, signal v bad here so texting not ideal_ —and locking the screen again. “He’ll ignore you for months and then decide you’re his new best friend.”

When he’d lost Theodosia, he hadn’t even met Angelica, and he’d been on personal leave so long he wasn’t officially partnered with anyone. Jefferson, with Madison’s hand on his elbow, had shown up at his house and poured coffee down his throat on the day of the funeral. Madison had been in the living room with Theo watching _Legally Blonde_ in Spanish. Jefferson had laid out Burr’s funeral suit on the bed for him, like he was a child, and filled his fridge with crusty pans of macaroni and cheese covered in aluminum foil. He remembered distinctly sitting on the edge of his bed with a tie in his hand, asking Jefferson, “Is this the worst day?”

“No,” Jefferson said. “You have your people with you today, you have your girl. There’s no worst day. You’re gonna have all worst nights for a while. Let me do that up for you, you’re stressing me out with it dangling like that, can’t let you go out looking unkempt.”

Then Burr had come back to work, eventually, and Jefferson had barely seemed to remember who he was.

He shook off the past and put the phone down. “Breakfast sounds good.”

Alexander pointed the spatula at him. “You did not have to sleep here. I did not ask you to sleep here.”

“You didn’t.” He rubbed his eyes and watched Alexander come into better focus. The shadows had gone out of him a little, good color back in him, and he’d bothered to redo his ponytail. “You look better.”

Alexander’s lips curved, very quickly and very softly, and he said, “Thank you,” to the air above Burr’s shoulder. When he made eye contact again, it was with more obstreperousness. “And don’t tell me any bullshit about how it’s policy. There’s no way the government’s mandating sleepovers.”

“We’re allowed considerable discretion—”

“Burr? Thank you. It’s a thank you.”

Burr nodded. Okay, sure, a thank you. “You’re welcome.”

“Good,” Alexander said, and the smile transformed effortlessly into a grin. The grin had greater confidence to it, as if Alexander were more comfortable with insouciance than gratitude—though that might just have been the way he looked in repose, the way some people relaxed into squints or frowns. Theodosia had said she looked forward to developing laugh-lines, to being the kind of person who laughed so much that her happiness had left its mark on her like a stamp and would show with no effort.

Burr couldn’t remember the last time he’d made no effort.

He stood up. “You almost done with breakfast? If we’re still doing all the shopping—if you’re up for it—we should get on the road early.”

“I make really good pancakes,” Alexander said, which was not, Burr noticed, a statement on when they’d be ready.

Since Alexander had left them smoldering in the pan, the end result of it all required him to spend some time scraping the charred remains out before making new ones—he took this with the kind of unfazed aplomb that told Burr this had happened to him more than once. He insisted on conversation while he started over, so Burr leaned against the counter and watched Alexander clean the burnt batter out of the pan, soapsuds glistening on his knuckles and between his fingers, and tried to think of something to say. He landed on what furniture Alexander was looking to buy.

The subject, since Alexander had opinions, kept them occupied throughout the rest of the cooking, the breakfast, and the car ride to the bookstore.

“—preferably in cherry,” Alexander finished as he unbuckled his seatbelt. “Wait, do I have money? If you take me around all day and buy me things, people are going to get ideas.”

“Ha,” Burr said. “You have money.” He took out his wallet and found the card with ALEXANDER HAMILTON glossed onto it in raised silver letters. “Debit, not credit. The balance is five thousand to start. Regular deposits will come in, and you’ll get enough to live on.”

“Champagne living or beer living? Wait, let me contextualize it for you. Chocolate stout living? Are we talking that kind of luxury?”

“I’d kind of hoped all the jokes were just you without any sleep.”

“My life is shit and there’s a price on my head. I’m laughing in the face of casualties and sorrow.”

“So before George King—”

“Same smart mouth, fewer Freudian excuses.” He divested Burr of the card with a magician’s flourish and tucked it right into his hip pocket. “You’re coming in, right? You read, don’t you?”

“No,” Burr said. “All I ever did in school was party. I was unstoppable.”

“I remember this from when we were roommates,” Alexander said. “This dry sense of humor. Come on.”

Burr did like to read, but he’d never felt that almost pornographic adoration of the smell of glue or the slip and slide of a dust jacket in his hands: he’d made the switch to an e-reader early and hadn’t regretted it. He liked the blankness of the device itself. Angelica had said he was the kind of person who would have brown-bagged every book he’d had growing up, but—though this seemed too revealing to clarify—he hadn’t, because that was conspicuous in its avoidance. Drinking out of a brown paper bag was a confession of liquor; reading a book with a brown paper cover was a confession of pornography. Of which Burr had read his share, of course, but he doubted he could have explained to her that letting a stray kink or predilection out into the world wasn’t the only issue. Books admitted things about you. An Oprah’s Book Club sticker, a cover with a spaceship, a battered childhood copy of _The Magician’s Nephew_. That his favorite Narnia book had always been _The Magician’s Nephew_ was something he had only bothered to explain to Theodosia: because Diggory had taken the fruit home from Narnia, fed it to his mother, and saved her life.

(After Theodosia’s funeral, he had tried to reread it and not been able to finish. He’d left a gap in Theo’s boxed set and she had never asked for it back.)

Books were revelations, and he sometimes felt if he gave anything away, he’d cut through an artery, and he’d be bled dry within seconds.

But Alexander seemed like there was no end to him. Burr couldn’t even imagine what it would be like, to give himself away so freely—to even have that much to give.

So even though he picked out a book to hold, both as a decoy and to dissuade Alexander from chattering recommendations at him, he kept it closed in one hand and instead read Alexander.

He wandered around the shop as though he’d never been in one before; he picked up books and seemed to read them with his fingertips instead of his eyes; he leaned on his toes and craned upwards to reach volumes on the top shelf only to pivot with an almost balletic grace, bend at the waist, and scoop up lower-hanging fruit. He balanced books on the narrow shelf of one hip, like a man carrying a baby. Never mind the Guinness, if Burr had really wanted to get him drunk, he could have just taken him here.

Then there was the entertainment of watching Alexander take stock of what he had gathered up and go through the necessity of pruning down the collection, which he did with the gravity of a man who had been presented with a litter of puppies and told those he did not choose would be promptly drowned in the nearest river. He stroked their spines with his thumb.

At last, he had it down to a manageable five. He’d chosen for length, in part, because they were all doorstoppers, especially the Studs Terkel.

He seemed personally affronted by Burr’s single volume.

“Let me pick something out for you.”

“You’re just looking for an excuse to buy another one,” Burr said, amused.

“Oh, bullshit, I owe you.”

“You can’t owe me something I don’t want.”

“ _That’s_ an interesting argument,” Alexander said.

Burr, to forestall interesting arguments, conceded that Alexander could buy him a book, which, an hour later, turned out to be really two books sharing a slipcover: H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices. “A no-brainer,” Alexander said about the conclusion he’d spent sixty minutes trying to draw. “One of the greatest journalists ever born in an edition by the greatest publisher to ever print. Library of America in and of itself is a good reason not to decamp the country when things are going badly.”

It didn’t escape Burr’s notice that Alexander had loaded up his arms with the storied history of a profession he was locked out of forever: Mencken, Terkel, Janet Malcolm, _Random Family_. The only nod to the new was James Hamilton’s _All the News That’s Fit to Sell_ , and somehow he doubted Alexander had noticed the name. It couldn’t possibly have felt like his yet. Burr let him pay, accepted his Mencken to tuck under his arm, and as they filed out the door—Alexander turning back to look ruefully behind him, like Lot’s wife—he said, quietly, “Did you own these already? I know you had to move out pretty quickly.”

“They said they couldn’t ship everything.”

“Packages are risky. We minimize transfers.”

“I didn’t own the Hamilton,” Alexander said, and then his mouth bowed downwards and Burr knew to a certainty he hadn’t noticed until just then, but he seemed to be forcing himself to take it well.

Burr bumped Alexander’s shoulder with his. “I’m looking forward to reading the Mencken.”

“What did you study in school, anyway?” Alexander arranged the books in the trunk of the car carefully, as if they were eggs that would break if Burr hit a pothole.

“History. Ancient, specifically—Greco-Roman.”

Alexander’s smile grew a little more natural. “Whole lot of white people.”

“Not all of them,” Burr said. “Septimius Severus, he was a Black Roman Emperor, and he wasn’t even the only one. They won’t teach you this in your classes, not in high school, anyway. But all those marble statues used to have paint on them—it’s only later they got worn down and rubbed off and everything looked white. How something gets remembered isn’t necessarily the way it really was. –What?”

Alexander was braced against the car, palms flat, and he looked like--

(--like he had just gotten off a cramped, non-stop, choppy flight with someone coughing steadily behind him the whole way, and his cab had been mired in traffic, and then he had gotten out at his hotel and looked out and seen the beach right there, laid out at his feet like a carpet. The ocean glittering at each peak of surf like an immense geode.)

\--this was even better than the bookstore. “Burr, that was cool.”

“I’m sure I used to bore you with that kind of thing all the time,” he said. “When we were roommates.”

“I have a lot of good memories of that time.”

“Come on,” Burr said, knocking against the hood of the car like it was a door Alexander would open for him. His hands felt nervous, twitchy. “Let’s go get you your furniture. I know a place.”

He checked his phone before he started the car up again. More texts from Jefferson:

_better signal yet YOU LYING ASSHOLE  
I will track your phone_

_…_

_okay Mads says I can’t track your phone bc ethics  
but I know you’re ignoring me_

Alexander, glancing over, said, “Why don’t you just answer him?”

“Because he doesn’t really want an answer, he wants to throw a tantrum. He doesn’t care where I am or what I do.” He realized that sounded, of all things, whiny. It shouldn’t have mattered to him—it didn’t matter to him—that Jefferson had only ever given him one week’s worth of real attention, when the orbit of his own bereavement had intersected ever so briefly with Burr’s. Jefferson gave him, after all, the same careless professional support he gave Angelica. Burr had good performance evaluations and no reprimands. Jefferson wouldn’t even write him up for this—not because he had a clear sense of the personal vs. the professional but just because he wouldn’t think about it. That was enough—Burr could be Nick Carraway observing Jefferson’s Daisy Buchanan-like vast carelessness. It didn’t mean anything.

“It _seems_ like he cares,” Alexander said. “From an evidentiary standpoint.”

“He thinks I’m not telling him something,” Burr said. He didn’t know why he was answering these questions. He didn’t need to let Alexander into this side of his life—and couldn’t have, anyway, since getting too deeply into why Jefferson was convinced Burr had something worth hiding would have meant explaining Madison’s theory of the exceptional. It would have been embarrassing.

So instead, he said, “Which is ridiculous, but sure, I can respond,” and he texted back:

_going to antiques store_

and immediately got back:

_you AARON BURR are going antiquing_

Burr said, _you go antiquing all the time._

 _WITH MADS NOT WITH WITNESSES_  
_and what the fuck do you have against antiquing_  
_…_  
_Burr, please continue with your day. America thanks you for your service._

The last meaning that Madison had confiscated Jefferson’s phone.

He pocketed his phone. “We should be good for a while.”

*

Later, Alexander would say: _I had a life before I met you._

He asked—he refused to be ashamed that this was one of the first questions he asked, back when they were still fitting him for a name and a history like tailors with measuring tapes and pins in their hands—what would happen if he ended up seeing a therapist. Hands tied by confidentiality, he’d said hopefully, holding up his hands with his wrists together. But he’d gotten a hard no.

“You ever heard of ‘wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which fills up first?’” one of them said. “Try putting doctor-patient confidentiality in one hand and ‘George King will bankroll your kids’ college education and your next three vacation homes’ in the other. I guarantee you the second hand’s gonna reach for a phone before you’re even in the parking lot.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be talking to _you_ , then.”

“Man, we’re vetted.”

“So corruption doesn’t happen? That’s nice.” _Awesome_ , he heard George drawl in his head. _Wow_.

She’d smiled. “Enjoy New York, Mr. Hamilton.”

So. There was nobody to talk to. There was Burr, but he’d put too much on Burr already. He couldn’t hold him up another day just to complain about nightmares.

He resented the dreams, actually, because it wasn’t that long ago that his dreams had all been epic and multicolored, vivid scraps of mental celluloid burning up inside him; he’d kept a head full of fantasies longer than anyone else he knew. All of it gloriously unreal. But ever since George and Seabury, he’d closed his eyes and something in his brain had whispered _rewind, rewind_ , and he’d found himself stuck in his own past, mired in it, like it was so much blood and mud. Fuck it.

It hadn’t been, strictly speaking, an undercover assignment: _that_ , he’d said to his editor, with deliberate guilelessness, could be _illegal_. He was just going to be _dishonest_. Which was _different_.

He’d rehearsed with himself the things he would be willing to do, to win George’s trust, and when he thought about what exposing the self-proclaimed king of crime would do for his byline, the list got long; later, when he’d seen what George was doing, when he thought he could stop him from doing it, it got longer. There was one night when he thought—really thought—he’d have to earn this story on his knees. But George, thank God, wasn’t really interested. Which didn’t mean, actually, that George hadn’t let him kneel down anyway.

“I just wanted to see if you _would_ ,” George said, in that pouty voice of his. “And you _did_.” He gave that screaming little laugh of his, the one that would have been funnier if he hadn’t had so many people killed. “Sweet, submissive—I _like_ that.”

Fuck, but it had been the highlight of his career, seeing the cops arrest Seabury, knowing that velvet-voiced snot-rag would crumble like he did.

Kind of a career highlight.

Kind of a career ender, given how much George promptly lost his shit.

So. Okay. Here he was. Alexander Hamilton.

Going antiquing and pretending to be fine. He amended that: he was mostly fine. He was a little ashamed of how well he’d slept last night.

He’d woken up only once—he’d been in a sleep so heavy and dreamless it’d been like being wrapped in thick flannel—and had walked just far enough down the hall to catch a glimpse of Burr on the sofa. The TV had been on, muted, and light patterns flickered on Burr’s face and shoulders like he was sleeping in front of a fireplace.

Gratitude twisted inside his belly like a snake. He hadn’t known before that the absence of fear could be so alarmingly visceral; as clean a high as sex.

He couldn’t really repay that with a book. Even with Mencken.

Of course, the best way to get them back to some kind of even was to stop accepting favors. This antique shop was a favor, of course, but he could make it a one-and-done. Get in, get the bookcase and desk, and get out. He’d already spent too much time in the bookstore.

Then he got a look at the place.

“Come on, man,” he said. “I thought you liked me. This is a horror movie house. Someone is sitting inside there right now wearing a mask made out of human skin.”

“Don’t be such a child.” Burr paused. He had his head back against the headrest, and his lips were just barely curved in a way Alexander was already starting to recognize as Burr’s more natural smile. “You will see a certain number of mannequins.”

“Are you informing me or using a Jedi mind-trick?”

“Informing. The shop-owner has an eccentric sense of humor.”

“Remember,” Alexander said, kicking open the car door. “It’s your job to protect me.”

There was a long, sprawling yard leading up to the repurposed barn that was evidently masquerading as the antiques store, and Alexander traversed it with the suspicions of a man walking across a minefield. There were lawn ornaments and bicycle wheels scattered in the grass, including several goats crafted out of scrap metal; he felt strangely drawn to those, and patted each one he passed briefly between their horns. Burr, seemingly tugged in his wake like a piece of flotsam, did the same thing, curling his fingers up against his palm after the last one. The goats failed to be animated by any of this and continued on as lawn ornaments.

“We could get you one,” Burr said.

Alexander took stock of them. “The blue one.” He reached for it, but Burr shook him off. “Hey, thanks, Jeeves.”

Burr carried the goat under one arm. It was an awkward fit, but he was suave enough to do it with a kind of smoothness Alexander knew he couldn’t have equaled, like he was holding something as normal as a picture frame.

“I’ll name it after you,” Alexander said. He reached for Greco-Roman history and came up with mythology instead, which, he thought, said something disparaging about their journalism. Fuck you anyway, Tacitus. “What’s that thing in mythology that had the legs of a goat?”

“Satyr.”

“Sa- _Burr_ ,” Alexander said.

“Please don’t.”

“It rhymes.”

“It’s not even recognizably a pun, absent this very particular context. And it just sounds like you’re saying ‘saber.’”

Irrelevant. What context did he have, anyway, outside of Burr? He tried to communicate this to Burr by shrugging as dispassionately as he could manage and Burr somehow seemed to get it. He hitched the saburr up a little higher on his hip; it nudged his shirt up to show a crescent of bare sepia skin against the black of his belt.

 _Hey_ , Alexander thought.

His turn to follow, this time: he let Burr pull open the robin’s egg blue screen door and hold it with his foot. Burr stepped back like he was an usher beckoning Alexander into a show.

Alexander came onto the porch and actually _felt_ his jaw drop, like he was in a cartoon, like his tongue would unspool out onto the ground.

“Thought so,” Burr said, his voice silky in its smugness, like a spoonful of mousse.

“This is pretty baller,” Alexander admitted.

It was crowded wall to wall and rafters to floor with eccentricities: a mannequin posed in her graduation mortarboard, some chairs and wagon-wheels drooping from the ceiling, a chessboard set-up mid-game, a suit of armor, a row of wooden apples descending in order of size, a decorous pine air freshener looped off the handle of an old card catalog desk. It had the same riotous order—for there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere—Alexander associated with his own mind; the same congruent incongruities. A dressmaker’s doll clothed in Christmas taffeta brushed her bustle against a collection of polished fishing rods.

“This is incredible,” he said, fondling a Tiffany lampshade. “You’ve been here before?”

“Once or twice.”

“Not—” He hesitated. “Not, like, _eighteen times_ , or anything?”

“There’s no need for clever code, though I’m impressed you got the number right this time,” Burr said dryly. “All the other times, I was alone.”

“Did you buy anything?”

Burr paused, like he was debating whether or not to hand over a dollar he thought for sure Alexander would spend on drink: “Carnival glass.”

Alexander blinked. “That stuff that looks like melted Mardi Gras rainbows?”

“Colorful.”

“Yeah, it kind of is.”

“I bought a pitcher.” Burr wasn’t looking at him; he was combing one-handed through some polished bone checkers as if his life depended on locating a particular one. “I have a small collection.”

“Well, if it isn’t Aaron Burr!”

Coming toward them was a guy so broad-chested Alexander was amazed he was able to make it up and down the stores without knocking anything down. To pile amazement on amazement, he was also wearing a midnight-blue blazer with silver-threaded black velvet lapels, like a casino blackjack dealer, and somehow making it work; the undertones of his skin were cooler than Burr’s and the silver, blue, and black all together made him look like some kind of Greek myth, a god of dreams or night skies.

“Hercules!” Burr said.

So he’d been half-right.

He stuck his hand in. “Alexander Hamilton.”

Hercules gave him one of those totally valueless retail smiles and kept his attention on Burr, because Burr? Had some sort of _reputation_? In antique circles? As a guy who bought carnival glass. Alexander couldn’t even begin to parse that. Burr, he was starting to think, was some sort of ink blot everyone was interpreting differently. The grandson of America’s only respectable televangelist—he’d worked that out by Burr’s age alone—and the son—Google had done the rest of this for him—of two of America’s foremost Black intellectuals; a US Marshal with a gun on his hip; model good looks and a catwalk way of moving; weirdly inattentive subordinate; widower; enthusiast of glassware that looked like it had been molded out of oil-slicks and hard candy.

He was not just not exclusively Alexander’s, he was not exclusively anyone’s. He wasn’t split nineteen ways, he was split ninety-nine.

“ _I AM LOOKING TO BUY A DESK_ ,” he said.

Hercules pulled back from Burr and this time the smile wasn’t automatic but genuine. “I like your energy, man.”

“I like your jacket.”

“Hey, thanks. Vintage threads turn up sometimes—not much of it fits, but I steal the patterns and make my own. This is an authentic Mulligan creation.”

“Your name is Hercules Mulligan and you failed to put that on a sign?”

“An oversight.”

“There are like a dozen old wooden signs right in my eyeline right now,” Alexander said. “Let’s paint those sons of bitches up and put them outside.’

Hercules was laughing a little now, in a pleasant, rumbling kind of way, and then he said, “And you know _Aaron Burr_?”

“We used to be roommates,” Burr said stiffly. “Alexander just moved to the area.”

“Oh, yeah?” Hercules said. “Welcome. Let’s get you hooked up with something classic. Nothing makes a home feel homier than a touch or two of good taste. Desk?”

“And I was thinking some bookshelves. Do you have delivery? We came in Burr’s car, I don’t know how much trunk space we’re talking about or if he’d want anything strapped on top—”

“I don’t have much of a staff,” Hercules said, “but I’ve got a truck, a van, and some time on my hands. If you pick out more than you can handle, I’ll run it over for you. No charge.”

But he’d gotten enough favors lately—fuck it, even the money was a handout, made palatable only because he could rationalize at least a little that the government owed him for all the shit it had put his mom through when she’d come over. He rallied. “Moving more than one piece of furniture is close enough to helping somebody actually move that I think I at least owe you pizza.”

“I was thinking Chinese,” Burr said. “Yelp—”

“Decency and courtesy are alive and well,” Hercules said. “All right, Ham. Pizza’s on. Come on, let me show you around. Burr, you know where I keep all the glass, right?”

“Sure,” Burr said. He didn’t move, though.

Alexander wanted to tell him it was okay. Hercules Mulligan was so very definitely unconnected to George King, who’d had the kind of ultra-pale upper echelons you got when your crime family claimed “not to see color.” And Burr already knew him.

“It’s okay,” Alexander said in a low voice as Hercules turned his back, already making a beeline for a rolltop desk Alexander liked for the sheer number of drawers. “You don’t have to hang around. I’ll be fine. I can get a ride home with him—let’s be real here, we both know I’m going to get at least two things, so that’s delivery and dinner, and I’m all set for the night. I’ll see you tomorrow or—” he decided to be brave, remembering that Burr had originally said it would be every day or _every other day_ during his first week, “the day after or something. You’ve been hanging around so much, man, let me cut you loose. I’m cool.”

“Right,” Burr said. He handled the word carefully, like it was another daring personal revelation: _I like carnival glass. I agree with this statement._ “You don’t need me.”

“I will absolutely one hundred percent be fine,” Alexander said.

Plus or minus the nightmares. But it had to be good that he was making friends. Shit, he hadn’t even really had any friends before.

“Yeah, you’re fine,” Burr said, and for a second, Alexander remembered him saying, _We’ll have this conversation pretending you’re fine_ , but this time Burr just said, “Right, sure you are,” and he didn’t sound sarcastic, just like he’d forgotten something, like he’d noticed a button on the floor and had bent down to pick it up. He lowered the goat to the floor.

“Okay, I gotta—” He pointed towards Hercules, who was waving him over to the desk. “Thanks for today. By the way.”

“Just doing my job,” Burr said. His smile could have been cut out of a magazine and pasted onto his mouth, it was that perfect.

 _Focus on the desk_ , Alexander told himself. The thing about desks was you could fit them into whatever little bit of life you were allowed: shove them up against a wall or into a corner and there they were. You could even write at them, if you wanted. Nobody would need to know.


	5. ev'ry disadvantage I've learned to manage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe the farmer's market to ossapher, who even supplied some of the details, like the blackberry as large as Hamilton's thumb.

Time passed.

Alexander practiced his signature, getting it looser and sloppier each time: after a month or so, it had the careless illegibility of a real name. He scrawled it at the bottom of receipts. Burr didn’t say a word about how much he was spending, but towards the end of each month, Burr would eyeball the new books and the gourmet olive oil and the new shabby-velvet footrest from Hercules’s place and he would come over the next day with Burr-ian staples: toilet paper, paper towels, farmer’s market produce, bakery bread wrapped in parchment. It was almost sweet, the way Burr tried to tide him over until the next stipend came in.

What he needed to do: stop putting Burr into the position of shelling out his own money—Alexander was ninety-nine point nine percent sure it was his own money—to get him through the month. What he kept doing anyway: putting Burr in exactly that position. Retail therapy.

It was Hercules who said, around the time Alexander started picking up antique magnifying glasses and looking at them with desperation, “Oh, I messed up with you, I keep forgetting to give you the friend discount.”

He gripped the handle of the magnifying glass to try to stop his relief from showing. “Selective discounts being one of the advantage to small-business ownership, I’m guessing.”

“Oh, yeah. That and denying them—we got a couple people come in trying to really put the ‘dick’ in ‘dickering’ and it’s a pleasure shutting that nonsense down. But I’m not talking about allaying your sticker-shock, man, I’m saying, like, as one friend to another, you want to hang out? You don’t always have to be coming by during business hours. Buy what you want to buy, not like I want to talk myself out of a sale, but if, on the off-chance, like, you’re getting kind of a hoarder problem just ‘cause you want to talk, I have an actual house.”

“What gave it away?” Alexander said dryly.

“Magnifying glasses? I don’t move those except to amateur jewelers and people who watch nothing but PBS mysteries.”

“They really are boring,” Alexander admitted. “I never figured out why places have so many of them.”

“Man, old magnifying glasses are the cockroaches of the antiques business, the suckers breed. You find them in the walls. You turn around there’s twelve of them where you coulda sworn you only had six a minute ago.” He knocked the flat of his hand against Alexander’s shoulder, and just like that, Alexander stopped needing Burr’s little care packages so much.

It seemed to take Burr a while to clue into that, because he definitely kept bringing them, although they got more and more frivolous, and then more and more frequent.

“Where are you even _finding_ this stuff?” Alexander said, poking at a blackberry that had to be the size of his thumb.

“America’s farmers deserve your support,” Burr said, in that way he had of speaking from time to time in canned slogans that sometimes seemed massively ironic and sometimes seemed unconscious. Then he paused. “You could come with me?”

*

Alexander in the farmer’s market: late August. He had his hair up in a messy bun and was, in Burr’s considered opinion, the only guy in the place who was making that work for him; the sun had lightly bronzed him and excitement had brought out the pink in his complexion. He looked good. Healthy, Burr clarified. Alexander looked healthy. He also looked like someone had cracked open a bank vault and let him rummage around inside to his heart’s content, because he kept dragging Burr over to look at things.

“Burr: _what is this yellow thing_.”

“That’s squash.”

“And these long, skinny cucumbers—”

“English cucumbers,” Burr said. “I’d throw in a vote for those, you’ll like them. Seedless, sweeter, less water inside.”

“I don’t even get the colors of these,” Alexander said, touching a tomato almost reverently. “And _why the fuck are there so many apples_ , Burr? They do this every week? This happens every weekend? This is a Saturday?”

“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Burr said dryly. He recommended a couple of the heirloom tomatoes—Alexander evinced a desire to try some of the stranger-looking ones—and pointed them towards the homemade pasta someone was selling in waxed-paper bundles. “But you’ve been to a Whole Foods. You knew it had to come from somewhere.”

Alexander snorted. “You think I ever lived in a neighborhood like that? In this country? Man, I grew up in a total food desert. I used to wait for it to be, like, peak vacation season, and I’d walk into hotels and take apples off the continental breakfast. Red Delicious. One kind of apple. You know, just to supplement the Hot Pockets and Wonderbread from the only store within ten blocks. This is—this is something else. I mean, at Columbia, things were better—meal plan—but it’s not like it was like this.”

Burr should have gotten him off the subject. It wasn’t Alexander Hamilton’s life they were talking about: Alexander Hamilton’s college had been Princeton, not Columbia.

Instead, he said, “There are urban farmer’s markets.”

“Yeah,” Alexander said. “It’s super cool of you to imply that eighteen year-old me was an asshole for not realizing the yuppies who priced us all out of the neighborhoods with decent food had Croc-wearing cousins ready to sell it all back to me.”

“That’s not what I meant.” It had kind of been what he’d meant. “I messed that up. Sorry.” He hefted the bag of English cucumbers. “I’ll buy these.”

“No, no, it’s fine, I got it. Saying sorry was enough, you don’t have to throw money at it.”

“It’s the only way I’ll win classism bingo.”

There was the snort again. He bumped his shoulder against Burr’s, which seemed to mean Burr had been forgiven. He was silent, but it was companionable silence, and it was kind of nice—and, with Alexander, rare, so Burr soaked it in. He looked at the canvas bag Alexander had looped around his wrist and then he looked at the carefully-clipped shadow of Alexander’s beard and then he looked at the crinkles at the corners of Alexander’s eyes. And then he just kept looking and couldn’t seem to stop.

*

Alexander fooled himself about it for a couple of weeks. He’d write longhand, for one thing. It put a buffer between page and publication, because anything he wrote that way would have to be typed. He would lace his hands behind his neck as he lay in bed listening to the house creak and settle around him—and he would barely sleep—and he would think about Burr saying that fools who ran their mouths off wound up dead and he would think, _I’m not dead yet_. He’d listen to the rustle and scrape—he, along with Burr armed with a trash can lid, would eventually discover a possum sheltering under the house—and he would think with the fervency of prayer that there was no one else in the house because he’d kept his end of the bargain. He hadn’t run his mouth. He’d followed the rules. The desk’s drawers and cubbyholes were stuffed with tight, every-word-counts articles on the three-strikes law and the refugee crisis, but they hadn’t left the house, hadn’t escaped into the ether. And they didn’t have his name on them anyway. Neither of his names. So, okay, he was still alive. Hooray for him.

He’d started biting his nails. He hadn’t done that since the hurricane. He’d be helping Hercules sort through trays of old coins and he’d get blood on the Buffalo nickels.

Then one day, he got a Twitter account. He didn’t post anything. He just sat there with his laptop open, drinking coffee, looking at the blank screen he could fill up so quickly.

One hundred forty characters. That wasn’t enough to deduce a style from. Burr had said he couldn’t publish, not that he couldn’t exist.

 _It’s 2016,_ he would say, if Burr asked. _There’s nothing more suspicious than a total recluse._

 _I don’t have a Twitter account_ , Burr would say.

_Exactly, and I find you hella suspicious. What am I supposed to say when somebody asks about it?_

_Have people been asking you about it?_

_Somebody could! I talk to people! I’m applying for jobs, man, you got to take this stuff into account—_

_Fine_ , Burr would concede. _Get a LinkedIn account._

He’d pull at the edges of his hair, which always got Burr’s attention for some reason. _Burr. No one uses LinkedIn. It’s where douchey middle-management fuckwits congratulate themselves on having made “network” into a verb._

Burr would give him one of those ambiguous little half-smiles that usually meant he found Alexander funny but didn’t think he was allowed to actually laugh. _No pictures_ , he’d say. _No Facebook. If you get an Instagram, all I want to see when I look at it is food._

 _Deal_ , Alexander would say. _We make some really pretty meals. I will Instagram the shit out of them and leave my face alone._

And then Burr would say, _Speaking of pretty—_

No. This was about convincing himself that he knew Burr well enough by now that they didn’t even really need to have the conversation anywhere outside of his head; this was about how he wasn’t doing anything so asinine as keeping a potential security concern a secret from the guy whose literal job was keeping him safe. It wasn’t about his weird crush.

He had a Twitter account and Burr would be cool with him having a Twitter account as long as Alexander never did anything as shortsighted as actually tell Burr about it.

Then his doorbell rang and he almost spilled coffee all over his keyboard. He shut all his windows, closed the laptop, and tried to walk to the door at a normal pace. He was steady. He was good.

It was Burr and a woman with wavy hair and a blood orange leather jacket; he’d seen her picture before on Burr’s phone, when Burr had conscientiously and painstakingly—Burr’s words, Alexander’s own had been “frustratingly slowly”—taken him through their code red procedure. If Burr needed Alexander to make a hasty retreat to the hideout-storage locker-fuckpad, he’d text ROCHAMBEAU, which Alexander maintained was the actual worst code-word ever conceived of because _why_ , that was going to be an AutoCorrect nightmare, and just because Burr’s boss had a massive hard-on for France didn’t mean—

Apparently it did mean, because Burr, Burr’s boss, and Burr’s partner were the only people to know the word.

“Be fair,” Burr said. “It has its advantages. No one’s going to ever accidentally text it to you. No one on the outside is going to guess it.”

But this didn’t seem like a ROCHAMBEAU situation. Burr looked too awkward for that.

So Alexander opened the door and said, “Hi.” He felt like he was holding the unhatched egg of his Twitter icon under his tongue like a cyanide capsule in a spy movie.

“This is my friend Angelica Schuyler,” Burr said.

“Alexander Hamilton.”

“I like your blue goat.”

“I named it after Burr.”

“I can see the resemblance.”

“Wow, this conversation would be more fun if we were actually inside the house,” Burr said.

Alexander took pity on him and waved them both in and then shut the door; he felt their eyes on him as he turned both locks.

Burr, the unbelievable asshole, actually introduced her again—“Angelica is my partner”—like he needed to clarify that her being his friend had just been a clever temporary ruse. Her face went cold and still, like frost on a windowpane. Alexander shot Burr a look that was meant to ask why he was being such a dick, but Burr was being the worst version of himself and refusing to acknowledge anything. Sometimes Alexander thought Burr had studied ancient history because there it was enough to put the paint back on the marble; he could congratulate himself then on how lifelike and accurate the stone was. But it was still stone.

So this was painted stone Burr. Alexander had seen him like this a couple of times before and hadn’t liked it then and didn’t like it now.

Alexander resolutely directed all of his attention towards Angelica. “I could name another lawn ornament after you, now that we’ve officially met.”

“I’m partial to flamingos.”

“Very graceful. A little tacky—”

“Tackiness is just style that’s self-conscious about itself. You get an unselfconscious flamingo, you can name it after me.”

“Angelingo,” Alexander said.

“I’m going to be on vacation in a few weeks,” Burr said, “so I wanted to introduce you to Angelica, since she’ll be your contact while I’m gone.”

Alexander reluctantly allowed to having some interest in this. “Where are you going?”

“I’m taking my daughter to Disney World.”

Burr’s daughter had come up in conversation maybe three times since Alexander had met him, and what Alexander knew about her could fit into an even smaller thimble than what he knew about Burr himself. Theodosia Burr, named after her mother, and usually called Theo. Fourteen or fifteen—she didn’t drive. She was at a boarding school, comfortably bankrolled there by Burr’s trust fund, and learning to be a Future Leader of America, a phrase Burr pronounced with obvious capital letters. And Burr adored her—Burr seemed to feel about his daughter the way Alexander felt about writing, like without her he’d only have half a life, half a brain, half a heart, half a tongue.

“Pictures of you in mouse ears or it didn’t happen,” Angelica said, and she had a small smile; she was trying, Alexander realized, to lean into the cuteness of the whole Burr-in-Disney-thing, to beat back that moment before.

“I’ll even bring back a set for you,” Burr said, and it was the weirdest thing Alexander had ever seen: Burr was actually genuinely smiling back, like _nothing had ever happened._

The end result of all of this was that Alexander got Angelica’s phone number, which he considered a net positive.

He sent her pictures of plastic flamingos.

_This one?_

_No_ , she said. _Its eyes look uncertain. That’s an existentially-inclined flamingo._

_have you heard from him?_

_our mutual friend the existentially-inclined flamingo? yeah_

She forwarded on to him a picture of Burr in the promised mouse ears. The shot was a little low, angled upwards—taken, Alexander realized, by Theo. He wondered who Theo thought Angelica was. A friend? A girlfriend? Burr probably already had a girlfriend. Alexander needed to spend more time looking for Angelica’s flamingo and less time thinking about Burr.

He enlisted Hercules’s assistance.

Of a concrete set of two flamingos sculpted together to touch at their beaks, he said, _I could name one after you and one after Burr._ He wasn’t sure this was an improvement, and he also wasn’t sure what he was doing—flirting with her? Flirting with Burr? While pretending they were flirting with each other? It was just a distraction from the open laptop screen. He hadn’t typed anything yet, so it was like he hadn’t done anything. Words were the only thing that counted.

Angelica: _Burr would lose his shit. You wouldn’t dare._

Alexander: _I would so fuck Burr._

Angelica: _You’re missing a comma in the middle of that phrase._

So that, unsurprisingly, was the night he actually got involved. He cruised Twitter looking for fights—that was the kind of tough guy he was, he thought wryly, sitting at home in sweatpants, his skin clammy from fear and anticipation, ducking into hashtags in search of assholes. Like the bisexual Puerto Rican—Nevisian, he reminded himself—Clint Eastwood. Of the digital age.

Two hours later, his eyes were burning from looking at the screen and nothing else, he’d pulled his feet up underneath him and his legs were asleep from the knee down, and he’d amassed two hundred tweets and thirty-seven followers. He was probably already on an FBI list, but fuck them, they couldn’t touch him at least until he testified against George. And Burr and Angelica would cut the balls off anyone who came for him after that.

Notwithstanding, he thought, what they’d do to his own if they ever saw this Twitter feed. But he was being careful. His name was nowhere near it. He wasn’t even touching his old soapboxes—he’d build new ones. God knew there was enough lumber in the world for that: whitewashing, fear-mongering, anti-immigration policies, mandatory minimums.

He cracked his knuckles and tried to breathe evenly. He felt like he was coming down off a panic attack, like he had to test the ground around him to make sure it was still stable. He’d made himself coffee at some point—he didn’t even remember doing that—but it was cold now. When had he started this? Maybe more time had gone by than he’d thought.

He went and microwaved the coffee and poured it into a fresh mug. It tasted like shit: faintly metallic, even. He’d have to tell Burr that that was the problem with him being gone. Alexander didn’t know the right brand of coffee to buy without him, and it felt like cheating to ask Angelica.

He settled for cutting up one of the farmer’s market apples from the last time he’d seen Burr. He arranged the slices on a plate and sprinkled them with cinnamon. He didn’t know if this would calm him down or not, but it was exactly the right kind of fussy, and he’d seen Hercules do it a time or two when they’d eaten brown-bag lunches behind his counter.

He went back to the computer. No more tonight, he told himself, but he couldn’t resist looking at the screen for notifications.

He had a direct message.

Alexander reached out for his phone automatically. “Burr,” he said, like Burr was already there.

He was going to open it and see one of George’s emojis.

 _You’re on your own?_ it would say. _Awesome! Wow!_ (Sparklers.) _Do you have a clue what happens now? ;-)_

And then he’d hear—instantaneously he’d hear, like in a horror movie—footsteps on the floor above him, footsteps coming down the stairs, and he’d see Burgoyne or one of the Howes. Would it be quick? What would they be more interested in, eliminating his testimony or sending a message? He had written so much down—they would know that. He had to think that they would be more interested in the message. The sun never set on George King’s empire until he came along: they would make him pay for whatever dusk they’d encountered since he last saw them.

He clicked on the message icon.

For a moment, he actually _read_ George’s message, literally saw it there on the screen.

Then he blinked and the image dissolved. Pure text.

A John Laurens.

 _Someone like you has no business just now getting a Twitter account,_ Laurens said. _Too soon to say I like your style?_


	6. your sentences left me defenseless

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Numbness/asleep bit goes to iniquiticity. Also, while I've usually used the OBC actors' ethnic backgrounds for the characters they play, John Laurens here is Cuban-American rather than of Puerto Rican descent, like Anthony Ramos.

“I distinctly remember telling you not to call me about this,” Burr said.

“And yet!” Alex said. “Here you are!” He had been unsparing—generous, even, he thought proudly—with the marshmallows in Burr’s hot chocolate, which meant there had only been bottom-of-the-bag powdery remains for his own; he derived some consolation from watching Burr chase them around with a spoon. It was a decorous, strangely precise endeavor. Alex had always just drank them down with the cocoa itself.

“Here I am,” Burr said, pinning a marshmallow against the side of his mug and lifting it up. “I don’t know that I know why.”

“No witness could ever ask for better protection.”

Burr frowned, which was rare—Alex had an encyclopedic knowledge of Burr’s smiles, real (he thought) or feigned, but that was all. “That reminds me, we should talk about your job.”

“I like my job.”

“ _Really_ ,” Burr said.

“I do.”

And he did, though not for any reasons he could explain to Burr. He liked the low-key mundaneness of the library desk, of check-outs and shelving, of directing Kool-Aid-stained parents to Toddler Hour in the children’s section. He liked—this was weirder—the fresh laminate smell of the library cards, and he liked being right about which of the four designs someone would choose. He liked the way the checkout desk backed firmly against a staff-only cordoned-off area so he didn’t feel open space bearing down against the back of his neck; he liked that when he was moving around, the shelves provided cover. He didn’t like that even now, in December, he didn’t walk through a space without plotting out where he would go in case of gunfire, the way, he imagined, earthquake survivors would always be looking for doorways.

He didn’t like that occasionally his coworkers seemed surprised by his intelligence—sometimes, to even consider it faintly rude, like he’d left his brilliance lying in the middle of the floor and they’d tripped on it. He didn’t like the way time sometimes seemed to stop, the way boredom hollowed out his skull like a melon-baller. But those times were rare.

Because there was John.

“You could do better,” Burr said.

Alex jerked his head up before he remembered Burr was talking about something else. The job. “It’s fine as a starting point. And, if you’ll remember, you took away my actual career.”

“Yes,” Burr said. “I personally did that. I am the entire reason that rule exists.”

“Hey, I have an idea.”

“I know.” Having divested his mug of marshmallows, Burr tilted it back and drank; when he put it down to speak again, he had a delicate mustache of froth. It was the only bit of messiness Alex had ever seen from him. “You want me to shovel your driveway. You’re not getting out of helping.”

“I’m offended.”

“Mm,” Burr said, as if he didn’t believe Alex was entitled to offense.

“Actually, I was going to say maybe we should talk about why _you_ have _your_ job.”

“Ah. That’s not really a very interesting story.”

Questions always seemed to roll off Burr like water off Teflon, but Alex had discovered that the secret was to just ask a second time: Burr’s walls had a lot of doors he could be persuaded to open. It wasn’t always worth the time, but John had actually cited Burr’s mother in a tweet recently, and the effect had been stranger than he’d liked. A half-guilty flush stealing up the back of his neck, like he’d been caught at something, like lipstick-on-his-collar or wrong-cologne-on-his-neck caught. He’d opened up his DM thread with John and typed, _I was roommates with her son at Princeton, did I tell you that? Aaron Burr_ , but then he deleted it. He thought, _I don’t want to use Burr like that. I don’t want to lie to John like that._ Never mind that he was already lying to John. Had been lying the second he’d told him his name.

But John was the first person to call him Alex. Burr and Angelica called him Alexander; Hercules called him Ham or, if he was feeling particularly expansive, Hammie. John was the one who’d broken in his ungainly, ill-fitting new name like a pair of shoes.

Burr’s family was a bridge to John. Good enough reason to press a little.

“You know everything about me,” Alex said. If he was lying to John, he could lie to Burr; they could both live with the illusion that he was giving them everything. And he could just live with this sour taste in his mouth all the time. “What am I going to tell the poor saburr when it asks where it comes from?”

“It comes from a store. Don’t be whimsical, Alexander.”

“Alex,” Alex said.

Burr raised his eyebrows. “Alex. I wondered if you were ever going to shorten it.”

“You spent that much time thinking about my name?”

Burr looked down and moved the spoon in little circles against the bottom of his mug. “It’s a good sign, you know. You’re settling in.”

“That’s a cool job insight from this job that you have when you could have had some other job,” Alex said.

Burr took both of their mugs to the sink and started washing up, but he let the water run longer than it needed to, just letting it pummel the floor of the sink. Steam started to rise. He said, over the faint roar of it, “You know they both died when I was very young,” and self-loathing rose up in the back of Alex’s throat like vomit. He might as well have noticed a scar on Burr and given him a knife to cut it back open. He knew what that kind of childhood was like. It was too late to call Burr off, though, so he made himself listen. Fuck him if he would ask for the show and then not buy a ticket.

“I read it on Wikipedia.”

“There you go,” Burr said, without turning around. “I’ve read their articles, too. Their collected works, and my grandfather’s. There’s a statue in a park—not too far from here, actually—of a Burr who fought in the Civil War. There are very few statues like that. So, you understand, I have a legacy to live up to.” He shut the water off abruptly.

“So you thought—” He didn’t want to finish the sentence because he could see too many ways for it to go wrong. If he said that Burr was trying to deliberately lower expectations, and that was wrong, then he would look like a dick, someone who didn’t value Burr’s job even as it kept him alive. If he said that Burr was doing something heroic, and that was wrong, then Burr would shut down again.

“You called me on it when we first met,” Burr said. “No one knows what I do for a living. I’ve—disappeared. There won’t be an article. You can’t lose a game you’re not playing.”

“I like winning,” Alex said.

In the silence that followed, he could hear Burr generously not saying, _And look where that got you._

He thought, _John would never say that. Or_ not _say it, and let me hear it anyway._

“Come on,” Burr said. He put the mugs neatly in the dish-rack, side by side, and dried his hands on the dishtowel he had, before they’d even met, hung from the drawer handle. Whenever he felt like this, Alex resented how deeply saturated his house was with Burr: he wished he could see some of Angelica there, even, but she’d confessed to him long ago that she phoned in the interior decorating pretty hard. So it was Burr, everywhere he looked, with just little islands of Hercules for relief, and he owed Hercules to Burr anyway, so. Inseparable. It only compounded that itchy, adulterous feeling.

(The first time John had typed _so what are you wearing?_ , all lowercase when normally, even when he was in his most heated debates, his typing kept its shirt tucked in and its tie straightened, so much learned and scrupulous correctness. And normally, he wasn’t so cliché. But there was a formalism to this, as stylized as a dance, and that was useful.

Alex hadn’t had—actually, he thought, _Alexander Hamilton_ was still a virgin. He was owed a digital deflowering. John didn’t even know what he looked like, though, which is what he said next, sans capitalization himself.

John said, _I know you_. There were no further signs of him typing. He seemed to think that said enough.

_What do you want me to be wearing?_

John was typing for a long time, but in the end, the message he sent was very short and to the point.

He’d looked at the screen, of course, during. And at the carnival glass vase Burr had given him, for the three-month mark, as if that were some consolation for the deadline on writing that Burr imagined he’d abided by, and imagined he’d minded so little that they didn’t even need to talk about it again. John knew him so well and Burr didn’t know him at all. He brought his gaze entirely back to the screen. It was unfair to be so distracted.)

“Alex?” Burr said. He was suddenly right beside Alex, and he had a look on his face like this wasn’t the first time he’d called Alex’s name—no, Alex realized, it was. It was just Burr getting used to saying it, instead of Alexander.

“Right,” Alex said. “Snow shovels.”

“You don’t have to come outside,” Burr said, which meant he’d realized that his silence had been dickish. “You’re still getting over that cold.”

“Am I allowed to date?” Alex said abruptly.

“Oh.” Burr seemed to think that if he stood perfectly still, the question, like a T-rex, wouldn’t be able to see him. “—Of course you’re allowed to date. Of course disclosure is still an issue, but—of course you’re allowed to date. You can date whoever you like, anyone would be—have you met someone?”

He was so awkward about it, Alex thought, forgiving him: he was so obviously someone’s dad. He raised his eyebrows a little, and Burr kept talking.

“We’ve never discussed preferences,” Burr said. “Ah—men, women, both?” He paused. “Or is that an irrelevant question?”

“It isn’t irrelevant,” Alex said, taking pity on him. “Both, actually.”

“Me too,” Burr said. He was looking out the kitchen window at the untouched heaps of snow in Alex’s driveway. He cleared his throat twice. “Also bisexual.”

“Wow. Both members of the same club.” There was a time, he almost said, when Burr turning out to be bi would have been a genuine erotic and romantic distraction, a sharp pebble in the shoe of his life, but he couldn’t explain that without explaining why it wasn’t like that now; he also, and more irritatingly, wasn’t sure that it didn’t still matter to him, a little. Some part of him was still made of iron filings, prone to lining up irresistibly around Burr’s silhouette, like his crush was a living, breathing shadow. It was unfair to John—it was unfair to Burr, too, for that matter, who had never asked for it. Who was just a nice guy doing his job. “Pretty cool club.”

“Elite membership,” Burr said, turning back from the window. He had a veneer of friendliness on like a plastic Halloween mask; it still left his eyes uncovered. “For women, your options are more open; for men, too, really, it’s a friendly area. But if you’re looking for gay bars—”

“It cannot _possibly_ be in your job description to help me get a date.”

“It’s an implied power. Taking steps to—make you happy.”

“Choose another implication,” Alex said, amused, and a little more lifelike of an expression settled back onto Burr’s features. “And quit stalling.”

“Literally all I’ve done is respond to your questions.”

“I bought you a hat,” Alex said, charitably ignoring that nitpick. He ushered Burr back to the bedroom and he had time to wonder why he’d kept it there: with the bed unmade, sheets flipped back in messy triangles like a child’s drawing of waves, and the laptop on the second pillow like it was John’s sleeping head, it all felt uncomfortably like he was trying to confess something. Like a cry for help. A cry for empathy? Help me, Aaron Burr, you’re my only hope: I love a guy I met online and I can’t even tell him my real name.

He found the shopping bag with the hat and produced it with an elaborate flourish. Magician’s misdirection. Yeah, he’d seen _The Prestige._

“This is an Elmer Fudd hat,” Burr said.

“You have a buzz-cut. Your head is going to get cold. And you’ll remember from that Everest documentary we saw that the human body loses a lot of heat through the top of the head and the ears. I don’t want you dying of hypothermia doing me a favor.”

“And this is the hat that you chose.” He put it on, but didn’t buckle the chinstraps, which seemed fair—it was probably the same as buckling a bike helmet. A good idea, but somehow a fundamentally uncool one.

“It’s very cute,” Alex said. And it was. He hadn’t chosen it just for the comedic value—it was checked charcoal and deep blue and light purple, with oatmeal-colored stretches of “fur,” and honestly, Burr looked kind of delicious in it, and Alex wasn’t even going to apologize for thinking that, because it was true. Anyone would think it.

He gave Burr a little shove. “Okay, out, I want to put on long-johns and a parka and everything if I’m going to be standing in the snow watching you shovel for an hour.”

“I think you meant ‘helping,’” Burr said.

“I’ll be lending moral support. I’m getting over a cold, remember?”

With Burr on the other side of the door, he stripped down quickly, and practically hurled himself into the long-johns and the rest of it, and then opened up his laptop and found John on G-chat. John was almost always logged-in, the circle next to his name a bubble that Alex could pop at any moment and get an answer from within minutes or even seconds. John hadn’t been online as much in the first few weeks they’d known each other, but now things were different, even though they hadn’t said anything about it. It was way too early to talk about things like that. Alex just thought them, instead. And—he was a journalist. He observed. The way their messages clicked together like puzzle pieces, the way they built arguments with the same crackling intensity they brought to building mutual jerk-off scenarios. John, he knew, wanted his phone number, or at least a Skype number, but he hadn’t asked yet.

 _When he asks_ , Alex told himself, _I’ll say yes._

In the meantime, he clicked on John’s name and wrote: _missing you._

 _I miss you too_ , John wrote back right away. _Are you free? I have to tell you about my dad’s latest attempt to convince me that Marco Rubio is the best thing to happen to America since Operation Peter Pan._

 _Republicans wouldn’t even fund Pedro Pan today,_ Alex said automatically. _anyway, no, have a friend over to help me shovel out driveway._

_It’s snowing where you are?_

Alex hesitated. _Yeah_ , he said finally. _Lots of snow._

_Stay warm, querido._

He looked at the word a long time and thought about John judiciously not asking anything else, John accepting these pathetic limitations, John mashing keys with rage when he watched debate footage, and he thought, _Fuck it._

_Love you._

The reply came so quickly he didn’t even see the dots indicating John was typing.

_I love you too._

He blew a little kiss at the screen and went outside to watch Burr shovel snow. He had his hands in his pockets, his gloves forgotten, and the wind whipped against the cuffs of his coat and shuddered down into every crevice he left exposed, chapped his fingers dry, but he really didn’t have any trouble staying warm.

*

The cold was very useful for pretending there was some acceptable reason for Burr’s numbness. He deliberately left the heat off on his drive back to the office. Snow blew from the sides of the road and whipped back and forth across his windshield and that was fine, like the cold was fine, because it gave him an excuse to grip the steering wheel more tightly. He had to hold onto something.

“You’re being overdramatic,” he said. By habit, his voice sounded very calm, so flat it could have been ironed.

Theo hated it when he sounded like that; Theodosia had only liked it under extraordinarily specific circumstances. She had liked him to read her Constitutional law textbooks to her in it, placid as a lake, controlled as a machine, while she touched him. She had waited, breath in her throat, to hear him stutter, to hear syllables dragged out, to hear his voice roughened. He missed her—whatever it was he had with Alexander, whatever ridiculous torch he carried, had not dimmed that. Sometimes it even made it worse, because before Alex, he had gone whole days sometimes without thinking of her, like fascination was a muscle he hadn’t moved in so long it had fallen asleep. Now the pins and needles were back. He would move and there she was.

“You couldn’t have done this anyway,” he said. He didn’t know if he meant that he couldn’t have been with a witness—that was true—or that he couldn’t have started over and felt those things again—that was also true. He’d told Alexander that all he’d wanted was to disappear. He had done that. Alex hadn’t seen him just like Angelica didn’t see him just like Jefferson and Madison and, oh, Burr thought, fuck them all, anyway. He didn’t need any of this. He was fine, he was doing fine. He had always liked the cold.

All he needed was to know that Theo was happy: to be able to take out his phone anytime he wanted and look at a picture of her exaggeratedly hugging a costumed Tigger, one foot popped up in the air like a princess in a movie, goofy, charmed, cheerful, childish, unworried.

He didn’t need anything else, and he wasn’t entitled to care about anything else. In the end everything would go back to sleep again. He knew how to live like that. It would be better, in a lot of ways.

He shut the car off and went into the office.

Thomas Jefferson was sitting in a chair dead-center in the middle of the floor. He spun around slowly to face Burr—if he’d had a white cat, the motherfucker would have been petting it. Which meant, Burr translated without effort, that he was in a mood. Jefferson could be ridiculous—he was wearing a hot pink satin smoking jacket at the moment, for one thing—and he could be a ham, but he was the _most awake_ man Burr had ever met and he emitted lazy arcs of electric attention even in his worst moments, the kind that could blister if it fell on you. Indolent, pettish, and brilliant.

“Shoveling snow?”

“Moonlighting,” Burr said. “I don’t make enough money.”

“He doesn’t,” Madison, as a kind of idle confirmation.

“Oh, cry me a river, you know he’s got a trust fund.” Jefferson looked back at Burr, liquid brown eyes amused but still very far from safe. “So what’s a lowly mortal gotta do to get the gold-plated Aaron Burr special treatment? And don’t you look just darlin’ in that hat.”

“You do, kind of,” Angelica said. She was leaning against her desk, the upper half of her body canted forward slightly, her weight bearing down against her toes: ready to come up swinging to defend him. “It’s the ear flaps.”

“And the way the fur’s all crusted with snow. Pretty as a glazed donut.”

Burr stripped off his gloves slowly, flexing his fingers back and forth to bring some feeling back into them. Ice crystals fell to the floor and rapidly made puddles. He needed time, though he didn’t know why he instinctively felt this would give him any: at best Jefferson would come away with the conclusion that Burr didn’t have the concentration to talk and unpeel his snow-sodden clothes at the same time. He did notice Jefferson had spared the puffy blue parka from ridicule, probably because he knew it was borrowed from Madison. He fiddled with the zipper—up, down, up, down—and then something came to him.

“I was substantiating a claim.”

“Ooh. That sounds exciting.”

“Not particularly. But someone gave him a backstory that he’s from the West Indies—”

“Nevis, specifically,” Jefferson said. So he’d looked. That wasn’t good. He ordinarily didn’t bother with things like that.

Burr went on smoothly, like it didn’t matter. “Right. He got it in his head that it would look good if he went around doing the wonderstruck thing.”

“Oh, yeah, the ‘what is this white stuff and why has it fallen from the sky?’ bit.”

“That’s the one.”

“You’re telling me you mapped out a whole backstory for him, that cute little roommate thing y’all’ve got, you having been buddies in Princeton, and the boy honestly tries to play he’s never seen snow?”

“Seen it, sure. But not shoveled it. First time homeowner, first time outside of the city.”

“Look at you, going the extra mile.”

“The gentleman in question,” Madison said, “seems to remind Burr a little of you.” He was constructing some sort of desk sculpture out of twisted paperclips and doing it with very great concentration, not even looking up at the rest of them: it all seemed immaterial to him or at any rate very far away. “The theory was advanced that exceptional people are entitled to exceptionalism. Somewhat against the democratic principles of the office, but—Angelica, could you hand me that red binder clip by your phone? Thank you—needs must, when the devil drives. The devil being George King in this case, is my understanding. I’m not actually supposed to know so much about this, but it seems like no one shuts up about this guy. Ham something-or-other. Do you like this?”

“Looks good, babe. Exceptional people. Me and loudmouth who’s all dumbfounded by snow.”

“If you ask me,” Burr said steadily, “he just didn’t want to shovel his own drive. But it wasn’t a bad gambit, to get some sympathetic attention from his neighbors, and to cement his story in their heads. I won’t be doing it again. Let him pay some kid ten dollars.”

“In this weather? Undercharging,” Angelica said.

“I trust him to haggle.”

“I like all this,” Jefferson said. “This camaraderie y’all got going. It’s cute.” He stood up and brushed off his smoking jacket—Burr watched little crumbs of icing fall to the floor and deduced the presence of pastries, which he finally turned up behind Madison’s computer monitor, and helped himself to a cruller as a prop, something to use to demonstrate his nonchalance. Jefferson seemed unconvinced by it.

“Cute,” he repeated. “Burr? I’m not stupid.”

“Thomas,” Madison said.

“Mads thinks it’s good for you, Angelica thinks it’s good for you,” Jefferson went on—Angelica ducked her head down, her cheeks darkening to a deep berry color—“this little crush of yours. Watch the little ice prince thaw, it’s so magical. And like I said, you getting laid, you getting a little heart-eyed over somebody, I like that.” With zero irony, and all apparent sincerity, he added, “I care about you.”

The cruller tasted like dust rolled in Vaseline. Burr made himself swallow anyway.

“Just don’t be stupid, Burr, that’s all I ask. You want to go around pelting those little candy hearts at a witness’s window: be mine? Not if you really think about it. I don’t want to have to be filling your spot in a year’s time, Burr, I hate meeting new people. I don’t want to look like an asshole. You keep your nose clean on this. You keep your dick dry. The world’s full of good-looking people, you go on and shovel the driveway of somebody not being targeted by the fucking ‘King’ of the fucking crime world.” He drew vicious air-quotes. “We clear on that? It’s trouble. It’s nothing but trouble. You coddle your exception all you want as long as you don’t fuck it up and as long as you don’t make trouble. And I don’t want to hear about this bullshit. If I hear about it, that’s already trouble.”

Jefferson popped Madison’s little sculpture up in his hand. “Looks good,” he said again. “For me?”

“Not at the moment,” Madison said. “We’ll talk.”

Jefferson inclined his head a little and settled the sculpture back down, very delicately.

“Burr? I want to hear a ‘yes, sir’ on this.”

There was no problem agreeing. Hamilton was smart. He was settling in. He was staying quiet, defending his mundane library job, picking up odd hours with Hercules. Dating. He would be no trouble. And this was as good an excuse as any to back off and not have to know his own real reason for doing it. He settled back into the old, familiar deadness with ease.

“Yes, sir,” Burr said. “Nothing to hear.”


	7. look around, look around

All afternoon, Angelica had been circling around Alex’s house like she had a bomb and was trying to decide which wire to cut. Burr, on the other hand, was perfectly still, as if he were posing for a picture. Did they know? Alex couldn’t decide. He felt like he had a scarlet T for Twitter pinned on his chest. He’d already given Angelica all the details of the latest flamingo hunt he’d gone on—he had, he said, driven down to a flea market barn Hercules had recommended to him. No dice.

“Nothing has your beauty and grace,” he said.

“Nothing in the lawn ornament section, anyway,” Burr said.

“I looked for carnival glass for you,” Alex said. He felt like he had to push every word like a boulder up a mountain and then wait, with it wobbling on the precipice, to see if they’d let it roll down the other side. “They had a couple pieces, but they were all a little damaged and most of them weren’t—” He tried to remember Hercules’s quick-and-dirty lesson in appraising carnival glass. “They weren’t heavily iridized. Weak tea bullshit.”

“Why carnival glass?” Angelica said.

“He collects it.”

She raised her eyebrows at Burr. “You collect carnival glass?”

“I know, isn’t it cute?”

“I have a couple of pieces,” Burr said.

Angelica seemed to give up on her prowl around Alex’s kitchen and settled down at the kitchen table. She grabbed an orange and restlessly mauled it, twitching off its peel with hard jerks of her fingernails, not even rolling it around on the table first to loosen it. The oranges, Alex had to admit, had been passive-aggressive: he’d meant Burr to notice their grocery store stickers and say they needed to try making the winter hours of the local farmers markets sometime. At the rate Angelica was going, though, the sticker was shredded along with everything else.

Burr seemed to wake up a little, but then again, Alex thought, that was the kind of fighter he was: he barely noticed when he bloodied you, but he could tell anger readily enough that he’d bob and weave all around the mat to keep from getting hit himself. Glass-jawed, thin-skinned, and as careless as anyone so fundamentally careful could ever be.

Alex had posed him to John almost like a puzzle and let John try to solve him and it wasn’t until they’d spent over half an hour with tweezers in Burr’s psyche like they were playing Operation that he realized he’d broken his own rule about mixing his two worlds. It was okay, though, because he had never said Burr’s name. “My old roommate,” that was all. His old roommate, who collected carnival glass, who was kind of funny, who was a good guy to know in a pinch; who didn’t know how to answer a straight question, who was all corners and odd angles. Plenty of it had been flattering. Still, he wouldn’t have liked someone doing it to him, teasing out which part of his past had caused which draft in his walls and what creak in his floorboards.

“Here,” Burr said, and he pulled something up on his phone and handed it over to Angelica.

She looked at it with staged boredom at first, but then she started to smile. “Okay,” she said. “You’re the guy who carries pictures around on his phone of his carnival glass collection.”

“So I can show dealers what I have already.”

“This is not a few pieces, Burr. This is a metric fuck-ton, this is like Versailles.”

“Wait, you haven’t been to his house?” Alex said. “Burr, are you _Batman_?”

“Batman was Bruce Wayne,” Burr said. “Bruce Wayne threw parties all the time at Wayne Manor, plenty of people went to Bruce Wayne’s house. Superman was the one with the Fortress of Solitude.”

“That’s a normal answer,” Alex said. “That’s a reasonable answer to the question that I asked.”

“I’ve been to the Fortress of Solitude,” Angelica said. “He just doesn’t keep the carnival glass up front.”

“What’s Burr’s house like?”

“We could talk about so many other things,” Burr said, with that throaty catch of come-on-you-two-please in his voice, the one that Alex had thought about a time or two before he’d met John. “We could talk about the new _Star Wars_.”

Alex was both touched and distracted by how vanilla and obvious Burr was in his geeky tastes—for every curveball he threw, like the cat show and the carnival glass, every glimpse of sparkly specificity, he had a million little pre-packaged conversational topics like this, like he wanted to be just the right degree of disarming. Every taste he pretended to be slightly embarrassed by had gone mainstream years ago. Alex did in fact want to talk about the new _Star Wars_ , but that wasn’t the point. He already knew what Burr would say about it. He might as well read the critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes.

He wanted to know about Burr’s house, which must have been at least a little bit his own.

“It’s nice,” Angelica said. She quickly looked at Burr, as if clearing the topic with him. He shrugged. “It’s more colorful than you’d expect. He has this screened-in porch in the back, glassed-in, and it’s all Spanish tile and bright red deck furniture, and when the sun hits it, it just blazes everything up.” She was contemplative, her eyes half-closed. Alex had encouraged people to do this when they were walking through a memory: he had interviewed people like this, leaning forward with a digital recorder or a phone in his hand. It occurred to him that Burr and Angelica may have done that, too. They were all experts in stripping knowledge away from other people. “You’d be disappointed in the lack of books. He reads all the time, but—”

“I know,” Alex said. “Strictly a digital guy.”

“Except for that giant H. L. Mencken collection.”

Burr ducked his head down and became very interested in his knees and Alex experienced one more of those awkward sledgehammer-blows of attraction— _the person I really love is far away_ , he told himself. _This is normal. The heart is loyal, but the blood is unreliable._

“It was a gift,” Burr said.

“Anyway,” Angelica said smoothly—she would have made, Alex sometimes thought, a very valiant knight in whatever kingdom would have had her, she rode that often to Burr’s rescue—“he’ll be at my place tonight. Schuyler sisters dinner, with one honorary member. My sister’s convinced that he’s lonely.”

They all politely pretended that this was not true, that Burr was not lonely, that Burr had a lot of friends and actually knew what to do with them.

When their visit was done, Alex played the gracious host and bagged up cookies for them. Burr stopped by the kitchen table and stood there, his fingers outstretched to stroke the vivid green stalk of the bamboo.

“This is still here,” he said quietly.

“Well, yeah,” Alex said. “You said those things live forever.”

*

Eliza Schuyler always sent out delicate, handmade invitations before the family dinners and Burr always kept them. The most recent was characteristic of the breed. Rose-colored paper, sprayed with some of her perfume, and a calligraphy menu that read:

_Appetizers_

chicken wings  
blue cheese + hot sauce

_Salad_

something from Whole Foods salad bar

_Entrée_

I will order a pizza

_Dessert_

honey lavender crème brûlée  
strawberries and raspberries  
champagne

“Eliza chooses one thing per dinner party to care about,” Angelica had said, the first time Burr had seen one of these menus. “She’s an exceptional cook, but she says dinner parties with exceptional menus are so stressful to arrange that there’s never exceptional conversation. So she’s selective. That’s fine with me. Food’s wasted on Peggy, anyway, she doesn’t have taste-buds. I’ve seen her eat Lunchables for dinner, those kid things with the little crackers and squares of processed bologna? I shudder to think what she eats when she’s on the road. Philip’s kind of a foodie, but he lives in California, so he’s spared the rest of us.”

This month’s Schuyler dinner would just be Angelica, Eliza, and Burr. Burr was assigned the salad—“Do not make a salad,” Angelica said. “Carry-out only. Eliza says if she sees any sign you made an effort, she’ll snap off your fingers and use them as salad tongs, she doesn’t want either of us going to any trouble”—and Angelica in charge ordering the wings and diversifying the sauces. Because they made the mistake of mentioning this in the office, Jefferson insisted they all tag along to the store to bitch about how Burr assembled the salad.

“These dinners of y’all’s are an insult to culinary sensibilities worldwide,” Jefferson said.

“You never got invited back, did you?” Burr said.

Madison looked up from the game of Tetris on his phone. “He did not.” He ignored Jefferson’s light thwack to his shoulder.

“Why aren’t you ever at Schuyler dinner?”

“I’ve never been to Schuyler dinner.”

“Jemmy comes down with mysterious, convenient ailments whenever he’s invited anywhere he doesn’t want to go,” Angelica said, rolling her eyes.

“Hey,” Jefferson said. “One of those was legitimate.”

“I don’t know,” Burr said, adding a thin layer of sunflower seeds on top of everything. “You could fake a burst appendix.”

Angelica tugged her purse strap further up her shoulder. She’d positioned herself in front of the chilled tray of peas, which Burr would have liked to add, but she seemed to be stuck there. In the white lights above the bar, the grayish-purple shadows under her eyes stood out, and he noticed for the first time that her nail polish wasn’t just chipped but chewed at the edges. He set the salad container gently down on the edge of the counter and grazed his hand over hers. She looked up, startled.

“Not excited about Schuyler dinner?”

“Aww, what’s wrong, Angie?”

Madison drew Jefferson off them as neatly as if he’d had him on a leash. “Undoubtedly, it’s occurred to her that this salad will represent the pinnacle of her evening’s dining experience. It would be gentlemanly to offer her some fresh pasta.” He pointed Jefferson towards that aisle, but before he walked off, he gave Burr an uncharacteristically plain look, that might as well have said, _Don’t fuck this up._

Burr didn’t think he’d done anything to deserve that.

“It’s not that bad of a salad,” he said lightly.

She offered him a strained laugh. “It’s a totally reasonable salad. It’s just that this is going to be the last Schuyler dinner for a while. Peggy wants to stay on the West Coast for a while—she’s getting better gigs there—and now Eliza’s heading out, too. She got _poached_.” She sounded proud and heartbroken all at once, as though someone had said a place she’d introduced them to, a place she’d never see again, was beautiful. “She’s going to be working for a national non-profit, revising and revitalizing the foster care system. So what am I supposed to say? I need you more?”

“You love her more,” Burr suggested, but love was not interchangeable with need. Alexander needed him. He pushed that thought aside. He couldn’t afford to confuse love and need, either, and anyway—he felt strange understanding this now, of all times—he loved her, too. She was pins and needles to him as much as Alex was.

Angelica wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “I love my sister more than anything in this life.”

“You’ve never been this far apart before?”

“We have, that’s why it’s so silly. We went to different schools. But that was always temporary, and now our lives are just going to be in different places. We’ll see each other. I know I’m being childish.”

“You’re not being childish,” Burr said. If he could no longer be numb—if that option really wasn’t available for him any longer—then he could at least be honest with himself. The people he loved—he wouldn’t want to lose them. He wanted them close; his hand against their skin, his hand now against Angelica’s tear-dampened fingertips. “That’s reasonable.”

“You would know,” she said.

“Sure. I know childishness.”

She smiled, her lips tight against her teeth. “I meant you’d know reasonableness. I bet you weren’t childish even as a child, Burr.”

Did she want an escape route or was she just looking to see if he’d take the nearest exit? He couldn’t be sure. He did something he’d never done before with her, though she had done not dissimilar things with him: he picked her hand up off the salad bar, stroked his thumb over her ragged nails, and pressed his mouth very briefly to her knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at her hand where his mouth had been, “that I didn’t cover more for you with Jefferson. He just asked me if I thought you maybe had a little crush. I didn’t know he was going to do what he did. I don’t think Jemmy knew, either.”

It hadn’t occurred to Burr to be angry with her about that. It had never occurred to him that he’d given her enough of his confidence to betray. He said, a little sheepishly, “I didn’t even know you knew.”

“That you liked him? You don’t exactly hide it well. No,” she said, her smile a little more natural this time, “I don’t think he knows. He doesn’t know enough about how you look at people who aren’t him.”

“Eliza knows how you look at her,” Burr said. He knew it wasn’t the same thing, a crush and a sister, but he thought, really, that in some basic, pared-down-to-the-bone way, that it was, despite that, because it was the same emotion through a different prism, at least when it came to this, to love and to loneliness.

“If I asked her to stay, she’d stay. I know she would.”

Burr had spent only hours with Eliza, really, a handful of Schuyler dinners, but he knew this about her, too. It was how she turned towards Angelica whenever Angelica came into the room. It was how they threw the Schuyler dinners at Angelica’s house but Eliza always did what little cooking needed to be done. It was how despite that, despite whatever work had gone into that night’s polenta or braised lamb or tomato-and-watermelon salad, he always remembered Angelica standing, restless, in motion, dancing to the radio with a half-full wineglass in her hand, and he always remembered Eliza sitting, her face turned upwards to marvel at her sister, a sunflower looking at the sun crossing the sky.

He also knew that Angelica loved her sister enough to sit and watch her dance, when Eliza finally felt it was her turn. So he didn’t tell her what she already knew—that she had to let Eliza go.

He didn’t kiss her again, either.

He popped open the salad container and slit the plastic wrapper around the fork. He reached for a dressing ladle and slopped some at random throughout the container before spearing an enormous, messy bite.

“Burr?”

Burr hadn’t done anything remotely like a stunt, let alone a technically illegal one, since—

Shit. His first actual moment of rebellion could be eating this salad without paying for it.

No, he thought, by the third or fourth bite, he’d married young, too, when he wasn’t supposed to do that, when he was supposed to have his career first; he had fathered Theodosia young, and he had named her after her mother, Theodosia Satpathy Burr, and not after his own, as his family had expected. There was that.

Angelica said, “Store clerk at three o’clock, starting to look over. Are you trying—you actually are, aren’t you? You’re actually trying to get us thrown out of a Whole Foods.”

“You’re just an innocent bystander,” Burr said. He speared a slice of green pepper. “I’m just trying to get myself thrown out of a Whole Foods for your amusement. To prove a point about childishness.”

She covered her mouth. “You can’t be serious.”

“Watch me.”

“I have never loved you more than in this moment.”

He looked at her doubtfully as he moved his fork sideways to pick up a stray piece of cheese. “You look like you’re about to cry.”

“I am, probably, but please don’t stop. If I actually get to watch someone escort you out of a Whole Foods, I’m going to die of happiness.”

“This is actually meant to be enough salad for three people,” Burr observed. “I’m not going to have an appetite for Schuyler dinner. And you’ll have to buy the actual salad after I get tossed. –That pun was unintentional.”

“Sir?”

“The fix is in,” Angelica said. Tears were standing out brightly in her eyes, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen her smile so widely.

“Sir, unless you’ve paid for that—”

Burr thought of Alex saying that yeah, bamboo lived practically forever, and he thought of Angelica saying that she didn’t think Alex knew how Burr looked at other people. He felt lighter than air, somehow, and he laid the fork sideways on top of the salad and closed the container again. “Of course,” he said. “I haven’t paid. This used to be full.” He looked over at Angelica, whose mouth was still trembling a little, and then figured, well, fuck it. He opened the container again. “I’m really committed to this, though,” he said, taking another bite. “This is really good.”

Angelica’s shoulders were hitching in and out and her throat was jumpy with suppressed laughter. He didn’t know what it said about him that he had known how she looked with a headache for longer than he had known what she looked like laughing. He reached over to the selection of dressings and chose a little more Italian.

“Sir,” the attendant said, evidently baffled, “I think I’m going to have to ask you to leave?” He pitched his voice up at the end, as if Burr could help him out on this point. As if he had not, he had to admit, encountered this specific situation before. All three of them had that in common.

“That seems fair,” Angelica said. She had her hand back over her mouth again, but he saw the edge of her smile around her fingers.

Burr handed her the salad box and got escorted from the building with great politeness and befuddlement. Once he was out in the parking lot, he said to the attendant, “She was having a bad day,” and gave him a twenty for the salad.

The clerk accepted it very cautiously. “It’s not really any of my business, sir.” He was a young guy and he looked, actually, like a cousin of Theodosia’s, the one who had catered their post-elopement reception and kindly steered Burr away from trying to eat his samosa with a knife and fork. “I would wait a week or two before coming back, though. The manager hates grazers.”

“Understood,” Burr said.

Unsurprisingly, Jefferson, who had driven them there, wasn’t inclined to rush his assessment of pasta and truffles purely to keep Burr company or even unlock the car for him, so Burr buttoned his coat and huddled against one of the store’s patio columns, trying to look like a guy waiting for a ride to pull up and not a disreputable grazer whose law-abiding friends were still inside. He thought, _I just got kicked out of a grocery store_. He thought, _I just made Angelica laugh._ He blew on his hands a little, but they were already warm.

The three of them came out fifteen minutes later, Jefferson squawking a little about how he really could have done better comparison-shopping on the olive oil if he’d only had time, Madison dispassionately noting that the temperature would drop to record lows that night, Angelica wet-nosed and still shakily beaming. She put her arm through his the moment she saw him.

“I hope you got another salad,” he said.

“I did my best to replicate the masterpiece.”

“Strange strategy for whatever it was you were thinking of achieving,” Jefferson said, “but no one’s going to argue with results, and the image of you being escorted out by security—”

“It was one clerk in an apron,” Madison said.

“Anyway, we bought you chocolate,” Jefferson said. He shoved a container of chocolate-covered espresso beans at Burr’s chest. “ _Mazel tov, chaver, choshever mentsch_.”

*

“I swear,” Alex said, “I should not be able to read your Twitter fights when I’m at work.”

“NSFW?”

He couldn’t get used to hearing John’s voice—exuberant, cocky, sweet, dropping into a kind of huskiness whenever he was at his most sincere or, relatedly, whenever he was on the edge, when all he was saying was “keep talking, keep talking, keep doing that, _please_.” He knew John wanted them to switch to video-chat soon and he knew that he would, that he would say yes to that, that it wasn’t in him to say no, but there was a sort of eroticism as well as safety in drawing this out, in progressing in this kind of intimacy-striptease from platform to platform, type to talk, talk to video. He had to admit there was something appealing about seeing John’s picture on Twitter—on all those news articles about Henry Laurens’s activist son—and being able to number his freckles or imagine his hands in John’s hair and know that John couldn’t do the same, that John was left, not having him, to fuck his voice and his words, a body made out language, a Derridean delight.

“ _Very_ not safe,” Alex agreed. “As I think the last half hour or so has demonstrated. You telling people to fuck off just gets me all hot and bothered.”

“What do you look like? Not—not physical features, but afterwards, what do you look like afterwards?”

“Ah.” He picked up his laptop. “Let me get to a mirror and I’ll tell you.” He carried it into the bathroom and set it down on the counter and then scrutinized himself in the vanity lights surrounding the mirror. He wouldn’t have to pretty up the truth—what he had to offer in this matter was good enough all on its own. “My hair’s messy—I think I put my hand in it at one point. It’s falling down. I’m still flushed. I bit down on my lips, so they’re swollen, a little, and shiny—I wish that was from you. Probably my pupils are a little bigger.”

“You’re beautiful,” John said quietly.

There was a knock, suddenly, that almost made Alex jump out of his skin. “Sorry,” he said, “just a minute, okay?”

“Way to ruin the moment,” John said, amused. “Go on.”

“Sorry, sorry.” He closed the laptop case and left it on the counter.

It was Burr, so Alex opened up the door at once. “Is something wrong? I thought tonight was your dinner with Angelica—”

“It was,” Burr said, and all at once Alex realized that Burr had the looseness of someone who had been carefully and even deliberately unwound by an evening of judicious drink and company—he wasn’t drunk, but he moved differently, as if all his joints had been oiled, and even his mouth was relaxed. Alex pressed his own lips together as if to blur whatever teeth-marks he’d left there. “It’s late—dinner’s over. I hope I didn’t wake you?” He raised a hand towards Alex’s disheveled hair and Alex quickly tightened up the hair-tie and fixed up the ponytail, shrugging off Burr’s look and shaking his head.

“I’ve just been thinking a lot today—because of Schuyler dinner, and this thing that happened earlier—about looking at people—and about—how sometimes you need to do things.”

“A very un-Burr-like proposition,” Alex said, bemused.

“I thought that, actually,” Burr said, “but this actually used to be the one thing I was good at. Seizing the moment.”

_Looking at people_ , Burr had said, and suddenly something about the way he looked now made something uncurl in Alex’s stomach, a lick of sinuous heat that was half-nervousness and half-something else entirely. He wished he were still in front of the mirror, that he could have known how he was looking back. _John_ , he thought. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Are you seeing anyone yet?”

He needed to say yes, he had to say yes, but he couldn’t say yes, because he hadn’t made up the lie yet, he hadn’t come up with how he and John had met—he didn’t even know whether or not to give John’s name. John was inseparable from all the rules he’d broken and all the secrets he was keeping.

“No,” he said. “No one.”

Burr put his hand on Alex’s cheek, almost tentatively. His fingers were still cold from being outside, and he smelled like wool and leather, aftershave and snow, and Alex understood that this was the moment in which he was being asked—that this was a question that he could answer by either leaning forward or pulling away—that Burr, even loose-limbed, even in this mood, would not do this without permission. And somehow he was stepping forward, closing the gap, and then Burr met him there. Burr’s mouth tasted like champagne and it was warm when the rest of him was cold and a snowflake on his collar was melting against Alex’s hand because he had reached up around Burr’s shoulders; he was biting at Burr’s lower lip so they would match. He was complicit in this. He didn’t give a damn about being complicit in this. _John. Burr. Burr. John._

“Burr,” he said, a little breathlessly, as there was space between them again.

Already, worry had created a little furrow between Burr’s eyebrows. “Should I not have?”

_I shouldn’t have_ , Alex thought. _John_. But he couldn’t let Burr think he’d done anything—that he had done anything awful, anything unwanted. He traced Burr’s jawline. “Am I acting like you shouldn’t have?”

Burr’s smile just then was unbelievably gorgeous. “No.”

“Then there you go.” He hesitated. “I just think—we should take it slow?”

“However you like,” Burr said. “Whatever you want,” and there was no need, because he was already reassured, for Alex to be doing what he was doing, to follow the curve of Burr’s jaw down to his chin, up again to his ear, to turn that into a caress of his cheek that doubled what Burr had already done to him, but, he told himself, he was touch-starved, he was hungry, he’d been living off words. He was a piece of shit to be doing this. He was an explosion that would injure everyone in his path. He at least did not step forward to kiss Burr again. Small consolations. He was not a good person.

Burr’s smile was still there, and still beautiful.

_You’re beautiful_ , John had said, the huskiness back in his voice.

So. Here he was. It was quiet, there in his entryway. He could still see the snow coming down outside. It was almost peaceful.


	8. you keep out of trouble and you double your choices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to iniquiticity and kiwisatsuma for helping me get the "Questions" scene to make sense, and to notjustreliablewiththeladies and everyone else who volunteered but who I ended up not being able to send the scene to because I got distracted messing with it until the last minute--I forgot that Tumblr erases private responses to asks and so I have blanked on who else volunteered! But you are appreciated and I am a terrible correspondent.

This was fine. This was all fine.

“So who was it?” John said, when Alex logged back in. There was a faint crunching sound in the background of him eating, and Alex concentrated on that, like if he could say—if he effectively knew—that somewhere John was eating popcorn and licking the salt and grease off his fingers, it would mean that he knew John well enough that anything else was negligible. It was something so small it could vanish.

There was a moment, then, when he could have told the truth, or at least some version of the truth. _That was my old roommate, the one I told you about. I made a mistake._

“Girls Scouts,” Alex said.

“Thin Mints?”

And for some reason he deemed it an acceptable compromise, an acceptable substitute for telling him the truth, to say, “Sorry, just Tagalongs. The peanut butter ones.”

“You disappoint me,” John said.

“Ha,” Alex said.

He wanted to ask John to turn on the camera—not being able to see him now seemed less like a tease and more like an almost physical ache—but he didn’t deserve to have that serve as some sort of pathetic emotional alibi, some pretense, even if it was only to himself—even if no one else knew—that he had kissed Burr only because John was so disembodied for him. Not true. He had wanted to kiss Burr for months.

“I can’t believe you answered the door for Girl Scouts when you’d just given yourself sex hair,” John said. “Clean yourself up first, you degenerate.”

“What if I moved?” Alex said. He could feel his pulse in his throat. “You’re in Charleston, right?”

“The differential between what I know about you and what you know about me is really just _boggling_ sometimes. Yeah, _querido_ , Charleston.” He didn’t sound offended, only amused: he was always angry at someone else, never at Alex, as if they’d forever be a team of two, fighting ignorance and dickishness until they were both red in the face, as if they could never betray each other. It made Alex feel like he was on autopsy table, like someone had cut into his chest.

He’d had the idea that there would be one moment in which he could confess—one perfect moment—and that once it passed he would feel better because he had chosen and it was over, but in fact, he could still do it. He was choosing, constantly, not to say anything.

“I have nothing keeping me here,” Alex said, shrugging it all off—Burr, Angelica, Hercules, his job, the search for the perfect flamingo, the farmer’s markets, the smell of Burr’s cologne. It wasn’t that they were all nothing. They were too much, they were too heavy, he wanted to be free of them, he wanted to burn his life down. He would move to Charleston and they would assign a new marshal to him, someone without a dry sense of humor and a hundred fake smiles and heartbreakingly careful kindness and a voice like molten gold, and he would drown himself in John Laurens and no one but John would know him well enough to see when he lied.

Though even John, it seemed, did not know him like that.

“You’d move for me?” John said. “You won’t even let me see what you look like.”

“Because I’m hideously unattractive.”

John laughed. “You’re not.”

“Um, only one of us would know, and it’s not you.”

“I know your mind, one, and your voice, two, and I know how excited you get when you realize someone is enough of an asshole that you can just destroy them without feeling guilty about it. I know that you can’t stand it when someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or when they’re standing in front of a tree and saying they don’t know what a forest is, because you have, I shit you not, ended multi-tweet screeds with all-caps CONTEXT IS A THING notes six times in the last week alone. You’re plenty attractive. You just might be hot enough to burn the country down.”

It wasn’t the first time John had said something like that. He was dating an Icarus. He couldn’t decide, on balance, if John, with his money, wanted to wreck the system because he could afford to think he didn’t need it or if John, with his money, wanted to wreck the system because he hated that he came from it. He supposed it would depend on what John wanted to leave behind in its place, but John never talked about that.

 _I’ll dismantle_ , he’d said. _You can be the one who builds._

 _I want something workable_ , Alex had said. _The perfect is the enemy of the good._

 _We’re workable_. Even then, he hadn’t been angry, even though Alex had thought they were sort of—almost—having some kind of fight. _The personal is political._

And for John, the political was aesthetic.

“Sometimes I think you’re a dream I’m having,” Alex said.

“Sugar,” John said, “I’m very real. Come to South Carolina and find out.”

“I will,” Alex said, feeling dizzy.

*

One week later, he kissed Burr again. They’d just finished watching _The Usual Suspects_ and he had been, the whole time, acutely aware of the shape of the space between their bodies. The restraint they were showing had an audible hum, the background noise of the AC running, the sound he never realized was there until it switched off. This, too, switched off. He straddled Burr and pressed his mouth down with so much force their teeth clicked together. Burr reached around and flattened his hands against Alex’s back and Alex let himself be pulled even closer until he was smashed against Burr—they weren’t even kissing. Burr’s breath was hot against his collarbone.

“This is not slow,” Burr said, amusement thick in his voice like syrup.

“Fuck slow.”

But he did slow down when he started again—he forced himself to understand what he was doing, that the taste of Burr’s mouth was not and would not be the taste of John’s, that he could cup his palm around the back of Burr’s head and feel nothing but the barest rub from how short Burr kept his hair but John had hair he could tangle his fingers in. He didn’t like having time to notice all the textures and details of his own awfulness. But it was fine, he thought, this was fine, because in a month he would be in Charleston. And he had to go slow in the meantime, because right now he didn’t want Burr to ask about it. _Why do you kiss like we’re running out of time?_

Burr wouldn’t sleep with him, though, which seemed ridiculous.

“If you’re worried about your job, the ship has sailed: your unprofessionalism is not solely determined by whether or not we’ve touched each other’s dicks.”

“Thank you. I’ll have you sign off on my next performance review.” He gently nudged Alex off him and Alex dismounted, feeling like this was the worst part of it all: that he was arguing that he should cheat on John _more_ and Burr, unknowingly, was saying that maybe he shouldn’t. That, in addition to the frustration. “It isn’t about that.”

“What is it about?”

“Since Theodosia—” Burr stopped. He put his hand over his eyes for a moment and breathed steadily.

Alex felt like he was mired up to his chest in ice-cold mud. He couldn’t even more. Burr’s dead wife, how had he forgotten about _Burr’s dead wife_? How had he thought he could juggle these people and not drop and break them? Because Burr at least—and he _knew_ it—was fragile. Humpty Dumpty clinging by his fingernails to some crack in the wall.

“I haven’t really dated,” Burr was saying. “This is—it’s just been a long time.”

“Oh.” He felt shame heat up the tips of his ears, where he always felt himself flush. “So you haven’t—”

Burr, amazingly, made something like a snort. “I haven’t _dated_. I’ve—it’s been a long time since _this_ , since I’ve been with someone I knew I wanted to see again.” He traced lines down each finger of Alex’s right hand, a warm caress into which Alex now knew enough to read some species of awe.

“That makes sense,” Alex said hoarsely. “I bet you never had any trouble finding someone to go home with you.”

“I went home with them, actually.”

“Right. Couldn’t risk them seeing your collection of carnival glass.”

“No.” He raised Alex’s hand to his mouth and kissed his knuckles. “I don’t open up to people easily—you probably know that. There’s my daughter, and there’s Angelica,” which was news to Alex, that Burr had managed to stop being such a standoffish dick to his partner, but Burr seemed to marvel over her name in almost the same way he marveled over Alex’s hand, so maybe, “and now there’s you.”

“Man, when you start something, you really hit the ground running.”

“Right.” Burr didn’t withdraw entirely, but some door behind his eyes closed, and although he didn’t let go of Alex’s hand, he was no longer really there: it was an animatronic function, like Burr was a Disney Hall of Presidents robot. “Slow. I’m sorry.”

Alex had always moved quickly, too—he wanted to reassure Burr of that, and to say, anyway, that after all, they had some sort of history with each other, one that was dense even if it wasn’t long, that Burr felt as inseparable from him sometimes as his own skin, but—but—he had talked his way out of this moment and that had to be enough for right now. This uneasy holding pattern. He didn’t know how he was going to ask Burr about moving to Charleston. Some part of him—the part that had known what he would do to get the George King story—thought, cynically, that he wouldn’t. That he would keep on having them both, these perfect non-intersecting circles of attraction, of affection.

The time for honesty continued, dragging itself forward minute by minute, and at last he understood something about his own silence.

It wasn’t just selfishness. He kept thinking, really, that he couldn’t do that to Burr. Burr would break.

John, though—John could withstand it, even if he wouldn’t understand it, even if Alex couldn’t explain why, exactly, he had ever said he was uninvolved. John would let him have this. And John was his real relationship, right? The one he would have had if he hadn’t needed to be safe, to be protected, to be wrapped in this stifling fucking cocoon of taxpayer money and beige. He’d met John because passion; he’d met Burr because of necessity. John would say yes to this.

_John would say yes to it the way Burr would have said yes to Twitter._

_Which means you don’t even have to ask._

He went to bed after Burr left and screwed his face down into the cool surface of his pillow. His eyes were hot. He thought, _I never asked to be in this situation_. If everything had gone the way he wanted it, he would be somewhere else, he would be someone else, and he wouldn’t be doing anything of this. It was early, but he nonetheless fell into a kind of fitful sleep and dreamed the sky above him had turned yellow, that everything smelled of decay, of saltwater, of swollen and water-logged wood, mud, shit, sweat, crowded bodies. The silence was overwhelming. He had lived through this before. He knew how to look up at the signs and say, _I’m about to get hit again._ He knew that in more ways than he could count.

When he woke up, he had all these voice messages from John on Skype and for a second, he didn’t know where or when or who he was. The hair on his arms stood up.

“John?” he said, like John could possibly be in the house.

And then he started to listen.

*

The game was called Questions, and honestly, Burr preferred it when they all played Super Mario: at least with Mario, they cut him out from the beginning instead of partway through the middle. They always started playing doubles—Burr and Jefferson against Angelica and Madison—and they always unfailingly collapsed within minutes to Jefferson and Madison shrugging off everyone else’s contributions and going to head-to-head. Jefferson always lost, which was the only bright side to it all.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jefferson said, “in the game of Questions—”

“I am the only lady here,” Angelica said.

“And we’ve all played this a hundred times,” Burr said.

“The _rules_ , you plebeians,” Jefferson said, “are sacrosanct and inviolable and will be made clear at the start of the game.”

“Which is another rule,” Madison said.

“Right, babe. Which is another rule. You will take turns, and you may only ask questions, which must flow smoothly from each other. No statements. No hesitations and no non sequiturs. No _repetitions_ , Burr.”

“No _rhetoric_ , Thomas,” Madison said mildly. “‘Who are any of us, really?’ is not a legitimate question.”

“You losing on rhetoric is the only joy I have in this,” Angelica said. “Last time, it was, ‘What _is_ liberty?’, ‘How has it come to this?’, and, my personal favorite, ‘Has God abandoned us?’”

“I can fire all of you,” Jefferson said. “I can build a new office up from scratch.”

“Wow,” Burr said. “How _has_ it come to this?”

“If we’ve gotten all that out of the way,” Madison said, “Angelica, you can begin for us. First serve.”

Angelica smiled. “Why do we pretend this is tennis?”

That seemed to be directed at Burr, who sighed and picked up the next question. “Isn’t it that way in—whatever Jefferson got this from?”

“Have you not seen the play?” Madison said instantly.

He was looking at Burr—there was no doubt the question was for him—but Jefferson unsurprisingly interposed himself anyway. Burr looked at his watch. A record-breaking fifteen seconds of actual participation.

“Couldn’t he just watch the movie?” Jefferson said.

“Do you favor adaptations?” Madison asked, without even sparing a glance for his supposed teammate.

Angelica sighed. Burr patted the chair next to him and she collapsed into it.

Jefferson: “Is there something wrong with them?”

Madison: “Don’t you value the artist’s intentions?”

“This is not a fun game,” Burr said.

“Statement,” Madison said, with more audible glee than Burr heard from him at any other time. “Fifteen love.”

Angelica made a T with her hands and took the moment to opine that the scoring system for tennis was utter bullshit.

“There’s no pausing,” Jefferson said, taking advantage of the pause himself. “And Burr’s not on my team. I don’t want Burr on my team.” He laced his hands behind his head, fanning out his curls with his forearms: Burr suspected Jefferson knew this looked almost annoyingly attractive but further suspected that Jefferson wasn’t doing it for _them_ and in fact probably posed in his chair like a cologne model even when he was alone. “Mads, let’s play singles. Cut these two amateurs out. Resume.”

Madison gave him an ambiguous little half-smile. “Why should I?”

“Isn’t that the game?”

“Who made the rules?”

“Who made the world?”

“Rhetoric,” Madison said. “Thirty love.”

Jefferson groaned.

“We don’t even have to be here for this,” Angelica said to Burr, scooting her chair over closer to him. He resisted the urge to back away from her—she couldn’t actually, he thought, see Alexander on him like a lipstick stain. He had helped her load Eliza’s moving van—couches and little round ottomans wrapped in pale lilac sheets, crystal vases stuffed with crumpled newspaper, enough books to make even Alex jealous—and afterwards he’d taken her out and gotten her very, very drunk, first on whiskey and then on grapefruit vodka. He’d been more comfortable with her drunk than sober.

But he remembered the smell of grapefruit on her breath and the pressure of her arm around his in the Whole Foods parking lot and he stayed close.

“You’ll notice,” he said, in a similarly low tone, “that he called us amateurs and then lost another point in under a minute.”

Jefferson and Madison played on, Jefferson having rallied:

“Is there a rule-book?”

“Is it in your library?”

“Would you like to check?”

“Why do you always ask me?”

“Who else is there to ask?”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“Are you mad at me?” Jefferson said, with a little wobble of his lower lip.

“Of course not!” Madison said.

Jefferson practically bounced. “Statement! Thirty _fifteen_ , thank you very much.”

“That was low, if you ask me,” Burr said.

“In his defense,” Angelica said, “curtailing the office entertainment budget and having us all riff on Tom Stoppard was his dorky idea in the first place, and he’s never even won. If I had a chance to beat Madison at Questions, I’d take it, dirty pool or not.”

Burr conceded that that was fair. Jefferson always lost on rhetoric, Angelica on statements, and Burr on repetition. Madison’s play was generally flawless.

Madison’s mouth had flattened out a little, though, and when he took his next serve, displeasure had rubbed all the velvet of his voice in the wrong direction: “Don’t you think that was manipulative?”

“Should I?” Jefferson said, a little anxiously.

“Am I your conscience?”

“Do I have another one?”

“Have you ever looked?”

“Would I find it if I did?”

“Why are you asking _me_?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Are you my business?”

Jefferson seemed legitimately stricken by the idea that he might not be: “Aren’t I?”

“What would be in it for me?” Madison said.

Jefferson visibly flinched. “Are _you_ mad at me?”

“Repetition,” Madison said, his mouth crinkling in a smile that was half-celebration and half-reassurance. He patted Jefferson on the shoulder like he was patting a dog on the head. “Forty fifteen, match point.”

“ _That_ was low,” Angelica said, whistling. “You two deserve each other.” She spun halfway towards Burr and he noticed, with a strange kind of tenderness—because there was nothing he liked better than being part of an Us gathered up against a Them—that he no longer had to consciously try not to back away. _I can have everything_ , he thought. _I can have this and I can have him, too._ “And here I thought all _your_ principles go out the window when you want to win.”

“Monopoly isn’t about cooperation,” Burr said, “and I seem to recall that you put hotels on all your orange properties and slammed me without mercy.”

“Monopoly isn’t about cooperation,” she mimicked in that nonsense, nasal way only people who grew up with siblings really ever mastered.

“Enough from the peanut gallery already,” Jefferson said. “You assholes already lost me one point.”

“Thomas, it’s your serve,” Madison said.

Jefferson grinned. “Are you that impatient to win?”

“Do you think that you’ll lose?”

“Are you going to cheat again?”

“Who started that?”

“Who _continued_ it?”

“Who will finish it?” Madison said, just slightly smiling again.

“Damn,” Burr said, impressed by that. His phone buzzed, the force of the vibration pulling it sideways on his desk, but he kept it locked for a moment, wanting to see how the game would resolve or, rather, how Madison would get Jefferson’s face down in the mud. He looked at the name. Alexander Hamilton. He kept meaning to change that to Alex. He put a hand up to hide his smile.

“Which one of us is more arrogant?” Jefferson asked in stage bafflement.

“Is it still arrogance if you win?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, have you already won?”

“Are you ready to give in?”

“Are they flirting?” Angelica said.

“I’ve always been afraid to ask,” Burr admitted. He was under the impression Madison didn’t date, but he wasn’t sure what that meant for him and Jefferson. All he really knew was anyone in the room with them was instantly a third party, somehow excluded from their cozy little circle. Theodosia had been the only person he had ever been one of two with.

His phone buzzed again. Alexander Hamilton (2). _One of two_ , Burr thought.

Then another buzz. Alexander Hamilton (3).

Not uncharacteristic, entirely, but still—he frowned and unlocked it.

“Don’t you see the value of a strategic retreat?” Madison said.

“You mean a Fabian strategy?”

“Must you bring Classics into everything?”

“Would you prefer something more modern?”

“Rochambeau,” Burr said. His jaw felt stiff. All that time studying statues, Alexander would say, and here he had turned to marble. He was holding his phone so tightly he kept thinking the screen would crack. “He texted ‘Rochambeau.’ Hamilton. His code red.”

“What,” Jefferson said. He took the phone out of Burr’s hand and Burr followed along with it, only to have Jefferson flatten his palm against Burr’s chest and hold him back. “Angelica, deal with your partner. Mads, you don’t win, the game is on fucking hold. Everyone in Kevlar in ten minutes and we come in hot and we come in pretty, smiles on our faces like nothing’s wrong. This is his burner?”

“No,” Burr said. “That’s his regular number, that’s his phone.”

“So he probably hasn’t _Watership Down_ -ed it to his little hidey-hole yet. Good.” He threw the phone back at Burr. “Call him. _While you walk_ , asshole, or else the mob will have chopped your darlin’ _petit chou_ up like a salad by the time we get there.” He pushed Burr towards Angelica, who put her hand between his shoulders and steered him, the wind to his ship. She was, he just barely realized, rubbing him a little. He had seen her do that to Peggy at a Schuyler dinner, with Peggy standing at the sink doing dishes, Peggy tense because a bandmate of hers was in the hospital going through some tests. Burr thought, _I am thinking too slowly._

He had moved this way when Theodosia had been diagnosed. Like he was underwater.

He called Alex and Alex picked up immediately. His voice was thick, unlovely, phlegmatic—he’d been crying and talking, he was talking before the connection even stabilized, so that Burr came in midstream. “—fucked up, Burr, I fucked up, I fucked up.”

“Alexander, listen to me.” Angelica was trying to say something to him but he couldn’t hear her. “Shh, calm down. I’m coming. I’m going to be right there.” His voice smooth, supple: this was all a lullaby he was singing. “What happened?”

“It’s John,” Alex said. “It’s John, Burr, they’ve got John, or they’re going to get John, I can’t tell, and I can’t reach him, Burr, you have to help me.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. Whatever it is, we’ll take care of it, I promise. Are you at the storage unit or your house?”

“Storage. I—shit, I ran, Burr, I’m a fucking coward, I—”

“No. You did everything just right, okay? You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.” Never mind the question of the phone. “Storage unit,” he said over his shoulder to Angelica. He had somehow gotten into his Kevlar vest. He didn’t even remember moving his arms. “Okay, who’s John? Who are we talking about? Is this someone you work with?”

“My boyfriend,” Alex said, and some expectation, some understanding, some _something_ in Burr shattered like someone had put their foot through a sheet of ice. “Burr, you have to help me, you have to help him, I can’t reach him, I don’t know where he is.”

“It’s all right,” Burr said. The numbness was back. He moved outside; got into the waiting car; confirmed the location of the storage unit for Jefferson. “Everything’s okay.”


	9. send a fully armed battalion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to try to fit in another chapter (it will likely be slightly shorter than the norm, just because of the way the events are going to go) towards the end of this week, but if I can't manage it, then the next chapter will arrive on April 17 or after. Apologies for the mini-hiatus! But I will be off getting married next Saturday and just getting back from my honeymoon the Saturday after that. If I were a more considerate person, I'd have done all this when these guys were in a better place. :-)

The storage locker might as well have been a submarine. It made Alex feel claustrophobic. Even at the beginning, his house had had its depersonalized hotel room charm, its framed reproductions of unrecognizable fruit bowls, its seashell-shaped soap dish. The storage locker had a black mini-fridge, black futon, black burner phone. Which he hadn’t remembered to use. He put his head in his hands and breathed. Burr was on his way and Burr had said that everything was fine and he believed Burr. Believed in Burr.

“I’ve been getting these DMs about you,” John had said, his voice initially wry. “Like, ‘hey, who is this guy, what’s he going to do?’ Like they’re interested in giving you a byline. But I know you’re strictly anon with your adoring public, present company excluded, so I didn’t give them anything, but maybe you should see what’s up?”

Next message.

“These guys are _persistent_ , okay?”

Next message.

“I told them to get a grip—you write one drunken description of some hypothetical date night—which I’ve gotta tell you, baby, was kind of cliché, and roses make me sneeze—and all of a sudden everyone is up on me about who you are and where you work out of, like, calm down, assholes, he’ll be back.” 

More messages.

Then:

“—Alex, are you in some kind of trouble? Because—shit, hang on. One second. Somebody’s—”

Alex bit the palm of his hand. They opened the door just then and he pulled away, startled, drawing a little blood from himself and leaving a messy circle of saliva behind. “Burr,” he said, still looking down at his hand. He didn’t even see Burr, but he knew Burr was there. He stood up and without hesitation crossed over to him and pressed his face against Burr’s shoulder. “Aaron,” he said experimentally. Burr patted him on the shoulder, his movements so wooden his joints almost creaked with puppet-like strain. Alex almost expected to hear the snap of fishing wire.

“Cozy,” someone said in a liquid Southern drawl. Alex pulled back and looked: he pegged the voice as belonging to the guy with the smirk and the cloud of corkscrew-curls. Angelica had put herself in front of him a little, like she was running interference. The other stranger was a little taller and broader, with a still, watchful expression on his face.

“Alexander,” Burr said. “This is Chief Deputy US Marshal Jefferson and Deputy US Marshal Madison.” He sounded like he was at a cocktail party. He had the weirdest smile on his face, a paper doll smile.

Madison, the stockier guy, said, “Burr said your boyfriend is Henry Laurens’s son?”

“John. Yeah.”

“We’ve already alerted PD in Charleston and the US Marshals in the area,” Angelica said, and Alex wanted to hug her, too, but she was bristled up somehow and had become untouchable: it was in the angle of her hip jutted out in front of Jefferson and in the way her voice, which was soothing, didn’t match her eyes. She wasn’t even looking at him. She was looking at Burr. “They’ll let us know as soon as they know something, but right now, there’s no reason to believe anything out of the ordinary has happened.”

“The _voicemail_ —” He had played it for them over the phone but now he took out his phone again and stared to hit play, to make them sit again through that rupture at the end of the message, as if it would mean the same thing to them that it did to him. He couldn’t tell the boundaries between his feelings and theirs and he only understood that distantly, vaguely; he still thought that if described it correctly, if he tried hard enough, they would feel John’s absence like a thorn.

“Yeah, we’ve heard the voicemail,” Jefferson said. “When did you get a Twitter account?”

“The date is on his first tweet,” Madison said, showing Jefferson his phone.

“Better question, then.” Jefferson had a shark’s smile that seemed to have too many teeth in it. “Did you tell Burr?”

There was a beat of silence, ripe like a cherry, a truth with a stone inside it. Alexander swallowed.

“Yeah,” Jefferson said. “Well, that’s better than the alternative, I suppose.”

“What was the alternative?”

“That you’d told me and I hadn’t told him,” Burr said. His voice sounded distant. He was the in-person version of going through a tunnel while on a call. Any minute now, he’d use something as an excuse to disconnect. But Alex was wrong, because Burr made eye contact then, and his voice was level. “He thinks it’s possible you might actually tell me things.”

It was only then that Alex actually remembered what he’d said—what he’d been asked and what he’d answered. _My boyfriend_. He felt sick.

“Anyway,” Burr said, “for right now, all we can do is wait.”

“What? We can’t wait. He could be in trouble!” _John, I never even touched you_. “I shouldn’t even have come here, I should have gone straight there, only—” He was tangentially aware of his breath whistling in and out of him; his throat felt too narrow. He’d been afraid, but he couldn’t say that, he didn’t even want to know that about himself, that when push came to shove, he had panicked. Had remembered the dust of glitter George’s hand had left on the nape of his neck and the way Seabury, in his delicate buttered-crumpet voice, had told someone over the phone that he prayed “the king” would show him mercy.

“I should have gone. I should be there right now.”

“You wouldn’t be there right now anyway,” Burr said. “That’s not how time works.”

“Fuck you, Burr.”

“Hamilton, calm down.”

“Don’t call me _Hamilton_ , my name isn’t _Alexander fucking Hamilton_ —”

“In any case,” Madison said, as though everything were normal, “you did the right thing in coming here and calling Burr. There’s a lot of unnecessary emotion in this room.” He did the most extraordinary thing—Alex almost couldn’t process it, it was so out-of-place—he walked over to the mini-fridge and took out a bottles of water and passed them around. “The chronology is you created a Twitter account—without Burr’s knowledge—and, very shortly thereafter, met John Laurens, Henry Laurens’s, ah, iconoclast of a son. You started dating?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you met?” Burr said.

Alex shot him a look, but he was back to being impassive. “No. He’s never even seen me.” _I was careful_ , he wanted to say, but he wouldn’t say it, he wouldn’t disavow John like that by implying that there’d ever been a risk he wasn’t trustworthy.

“It would help,” Angelica said, “if you’d let us go through your account. Any public posts you’ve made, any messages you’ve exchanged with John Laurens.”

“No. No way.”

“Mads can hack it anyway,” Jefferson said, with the return of the shark’s smile. “Since we’re all already operating under this ask-forgiveness-not-permission set of ethics anyhow. But okay, man, have it your way. Come, oh, midnight, you’re not gon’ be my problem anymore.”

“What? Burr, what is he—”

“You’ll be relocated,” Burr said. He was looking down at his cuffs, adjusting them, and it took Alex a moment to understand what was happening. This was Burr, angry—no, this was Burr, furious—his voice controlled because there was so much to control, his eyes down because they were burning. “The Southwest, probably. Hamilton. You created a highly visible, highly recognizable social media presence in a position where your only real job was to stay hidden. You endangered Senator Laurens’s son. And you didn’t tell me about any of it until—”

“This is _unbelievable_ , I have a _life_ here, you can’t just—and how fucking dare you use John as some point in your goddamn argument, he’s not just somebody’s son, and,” he had that feeling again, that tightness in his chest that he’d always thought augured only panic attacks but now seemed to be arguing this thick dark absence of fucks, this rage, this desire to burn everything down, “you’re jealous, you’re jealous I picked him over you, I was going to move there, I was going to _give you up_ —”

“Oh, shit, Burr,” Angelica said. “Tell me you didn’t.”

“Oh, I think we’re gonna find he did,” Jefferson said. He snapped his fingers. “Burr, go wait in the car. Try not to do anything unbelievably stupid on your way out. No shoplifting, no slipping your dick in government witnesses, no any kind of thing.”

_No, don’t go_ , Alex thought, almost reaching out for Burr as he brushed past, _don’t go when we’re just starting to get to know each other_ , because fuck the fucking they’d almost done, fuck Burr’s mouth against his and the way he’d felt sitting astride Burr looking down at him, this was real intimacy, this was the only way he’d ever gotten to know anyone. He was the Statue of Liberty asking for rage instead of huddled masses. He was as American as muckraking and the two-party system. He didn’t have it in him to not fall in love over an argument. And Burr. He hadn’t known there was anything to Burr, not really, except this elegant outline, cute and sad at the same time. But Burr was like him after all.

He caught Burr’s arm. “Aaron—”

“Who calls him Aaron?” Jefferson said. “Does anyone call him Aaron? His wife didn’t even call him Aaron.”

“I don’t even call myself Aaron,” Burr said, to Alex rather than to Jefferson. “And you never did. Your boyfriend’s going to be fine, by the way. _John_.” He shook Alex off and then he was gone.

“He’s right, you know,” Angelica said quietly. “Not even George King is going to put a target on someone who once shook the president’s hand.”

Madison stepped forward. “But it would help if you’d give us your password, or allow me to look at the account on your phone—any of the accounts you used to talk to John.”

The fight had gone out of him when Burr had left the room and he handed over his phone and told Madison the PIN to open it.

“Thank you.”

“There’s, ah.”

“Sexting,” Angelica said.

“Largely irrelevant for our purposes,” Madison said.

Jefferson raised his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t assume any of it’d be _largely_ anything. Mads, you want to go out to the car and make sure Burr doesn’t hang himself from the rearview mirror? --Speaking of hung. And it’ll give you some peace and quiet while you trawl through fuckboy’s accounts. Cross my heart I’ll play nice.”

“Leaving you with Angelica, I’m not so worried. Though not calling him ‘fuckboy’ might be a start.”

“Jemmy knows his exit lines,” Angelica said. She pushed Alex at the futon and he sat down to please her, but he didn’t like the way it left everyone else above him. Without Madison’s calm neutrality, there was no buffer; without Burr’s bruised and bloodied adoration, there was no focus. He was left alone with newly-minted dislike and disappointment; two professionals who would put on gloves to handle him so they wouldn’t get their hands dirty. He tried to think about John but he had somehow exhausted his terror—when he went groping after it, all he could lay hands on was a sort of distant nausea.

Jefferson made him go through it all, calm but merciless. When had his relationship with John started? When had his relationship with Burr started? Did he feel in any way that Burr had taken advantage of the powers afforded by his office in order to—

“No,” he said, aware for the first time of Jefferson’s gaze bearing down on him as pointedly as a scalpel, aware that this question and his answer to it mattered. He hadn’t wanted Jefferson to even consider it. It always surprised him to encounter ethics—even rudimentary ones—in people who held any power. “He was so careful. I told him at every point that it was okay. And he didn’t—we never—”

“Did the deed. Got it. Well, you were too busy, weren’t you?”

“Burr didn’t know about John Laurens,” Angelica said. She’d been quiet for most of the questioning; had discovered a surely-meant-ironically package of Twinkies in one of the plastic storage bins and was eating one of them methodically, licking the cream off her fingers. “That much was pretty obvious. Does Laurens know about Burr?”

“No.”

“Wow,” Jefferson said. “You’re all class, aren’t you?”

“Just quit it with the hypotheticals, will you? Do you have everything now? Are my answers to your satisfaction?”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve got one marshal all hearts-and-flowers besotted with a witness, almost-but-not-quite in bed with him, a former online journalist of said witness with a very active Twitter account, heavy-breathing-creepin’ on some asshole senator’s son, who has now gone AWOL, and you used a friend of mine like a wad of Kleenex, no, Hamilton, your answers aren’t to my satisfaction.”

“Wait, Burr’s your friend?”

Jefferson rolled his eyes. “Unbelievable.”

“In his defense,” Angelica said, with the closest thing to a real smile Alex had seen all day, “he’s seen literally nothing to indicate that. Neither have I.”

Alex took advantage of this momentary softness and said to her, “I never meant to hurt him.”

“Sure,” she said, dispassionately, as if they’d shared no jokes and had no history. Not as if she believed him, but as if he were so insignificant to her that the easiest thing to do was politely lie, just to save on time. She was there for Burr.

Jefferson wasn’t there for Alex, either, but he managed to make the time. “Like if you put an apple on his head and y’all started playing William Tell, you wouldn’t mean to put an arrow through his forehead, you were just messing around, but he’d still be dead in this really shitty, really predictable kind of way, like what did you think was going to happen? You,” he pointed at Alex, as if there were some question as to who he was talking about, “know nothing of loyalty. I am going to be so glad to wash my hands of you.”

“I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion,” Madison said as he slipped back inside, Burr in tow. Were Burr’s eyes a little red? Alex couldn’t tell. “There’s nothing here to indicate that John Laurens knows where to find him, or even knows enough to confirm his identity. No last name on any of their emails or chats. No pictures. You haven’t used the video function on Skype?”

Alex shook his head.

“You’ve been astonishingly careful for someone doing something so fundamentally reckless,” Madison said, so there was that word, “careful,” out in the air without his help. He didn’t have to feel guilty for it. “It must have meant a lot to you. Having an outlet.” He handed Alex back his phone. Their fingers didn’t brush—it was only ever with Burr that things like that had happened.

“Yeah.” Alex had no bitterness left. He was spent. He’d given them his name and his job and his home and his confidence and now he had to give them his words again and he couldn’t remember what the fucking point of all of it was. Safety? Did he even want to be safe? They must have asked him that at some point, and he must have said yes. He wanted John to be safe. “It mattered.”

Burr looked at him with eyes that were just holes in his face, eyes that had no bottom, and Alex thought, _I wanted you to be safe, too._ He hadn’t even protected Burr from himself. If he thought that in third person, like a line of copy, there was a grammatical shelter built into that reflexive pronoun. So yes, he thought, writing had meant something to him.

He wanted Burr to know that as much as he wanted Burr to know anything.

_That was the secret I was keeping from you, that was what was too precious to give up, what I had to hide, what I needed to keep to myself. Not John. This._

He hadn’t told Burr about John because John was so tied to the writing, and he couldn’t tell Burr about the writing, he couldn’t risk it. He hadn’t told John about Burr because—

_I didn’t want to risk_ you. _Reveal you._ As inseparable from him as his own skin, that was what he’d thought about Burr.

Look at them now.

He sighed. “So what happens to me, then?”

“If Jemmy says you don’t need to be moved, you don’t need to be moved,” Angelica said. She twisted the plastic Twinkie wrapper around her fingers and looked at Jefferson. “You know we’ll attract some attention scooping him out of a second life and getting him settled in a new one, especially right when King’s guys are buzzing around like wasps. He fucked up. We’ve had people fuck up before.”

“When _haven’t_ we?” Madison said, eyebrows raised. He helped himself to a Twinkie and offered Alex one.

Jefferson made a squawking sound and held out his hand and Madison sighed and gave him two, and Angelica posed Burr a series of questions like oyster knives slipping between the two halves of his shell, about old dinner parties and games Alex didn’t understand, and Alex sat there, dizzy even though he wasn’t moving, all of them spinning around him like a star display in a planetarium and all of this, he realized, was for his benefit, was as perfectly choreographed as a dance, and even Jefferson—even Burr—was playing along with it. He was being distracted. They had props, they had scripts, they had facial expressions as exaggerated as greasepaint. He didn’t doubt, really, that this was somewhat what they were like, and even somewhat what Burr was like in their company, but they were playing to an audience. They were giving him a show so he would look and not think.

He had a lump in his throat that he couldn’t swallow down.

Jefferson’s phone rang and he went outside at once. Alone, Alex observed reflexively—there seemed to be no question of Burr or even Madison going with him.

Burr sat down beside Alex and, after some agonizingly long moment, took his hand. Angelica turned to the side and engaged Madison in some rapid, low-pitched hum of conversation, her face reddening a little not with embarrassment but with concentration. More show, Alex thought. More effort.

Burr’s hand was warm, solid. Never made out of words, his Burr. He was, if anything, made out of an absence of them, like he was a collage of images: the light from the TV flickering across his face as he slept on Alex’s couch, his fingers curled around the neck of a bottle of chocolate stout, Burr patting the goats at Hercules’s store on their heads, Burr in his hat, Burr with him right now. Alex’s eyes and throat burned.

“Are you guarding me or keeping me company?”

“I don’t know that I could stop you from rushing the door, if you really wanted to,” Burr said. He rubbed circles into the back of Alex’s hand. “I’m just here.”

“Are you still angry with me?”

“That’s not fair.”

“No,” Alex said. “I guess it’s not.” He wanted to ask if John would really be okay, but Burr would lie about that, if he had to, if he thought it would calm Alex down, so there was no point. He just wasn’t used to waiting. “Did your wife really not call you by your first name?”

“She was a poet.” Burr’s voice was soft. And suddenly he and Alex were the show, and Madison and Angelica were looking over at them like the curtains had just been drawn back and the lights had gone down. “She—she worked with rhyme and rhythm, sonnets and villanelles, rap lyrics, fixed verse, and she was interested in how they affected memory. Children’s songs always rhyme. She hated free verse. She wrote me love poems—she used to—and she said more things rhymed with ‘Burr.’”

“I didn’t know that,” Angelica said. She looked at Madison. “Did you know that?”

He inclined his head. He said to Burr, “You used to talk more back then. I remember when you brought Theo into work when she was a baby, before she knew enough to realize that the chess-sets and coloring books we had for her weren’t exactly customary for any particular line of work.”

“She remembered much more of that than I thought she would,” Burr said, with a little half-smile. “I remember when she was in first grade, she’d come home and ask me if I colored anything at work.”

“You guys color?”

“Not so much anymore,” Angelica said. “Lately Burr just watches us play video games.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” Madison said.

Yeah—he’d thrown pennies into a bucket all his life for this, in a way, for this storage unit with its recycled-air smell and nuclear-disaster Twinkies, for these four people to stand around him with guns, for them to know enough to keep him company. The only thing he had that he hadn’t paid for was Burr’s hand on his. Burr had just given him that.


	10. have you ever seen somebody ruin their own life?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because of the break and general busyness, I am very behind in replying to comments! Please be assured that they are still greatly valued and bring me immense joy, and I really want to thank everyone for their congratulations and best wishes especially. You are all amazing.
> 
> Thanks to herowndeliverance for looking over this chapter early for me!

Alexander’s hand was sweaty and his fingers kept beating staccato time against Burr’s, distress signals sent in Morse code. When Jefferson came in, Burr thought, Alexander would peel away from him, would drop Burr’s hand like he was in a game of hot potato—but then Jefferson came back and Alex only tightened his grip.

Jefferson held up a hand. “He’s alive. He’s sitting in a police department in Charleston.”

“He’s safe?”

Madison made a slight chuffing sound in the back of his throat and Jefferson pointed at him. “Yeah, Mads is right, PD in South Carolina is never exactly safe, but it’s a few rungs up the ladder from sitting in an abandoned warehouse somewhere with his tender bits in a vise. And he’s still Henry Laurens’s son, so yeah, for the moment, safe enough.”

Reprieve fell on Alex’s face like a sunbeam and, now that the danger was over, Burr had a moment to let it crystallize how much he hated that this was the most beautiful he had ever seen Alex look: violet shadows under his eyes, every hair in his short beard fine as a pencil line across his skin, sweat beaded in the hair of his temples, a mess, but with light radiating out of him and through him. This was how Alexander Hamilton looked like when he was in love. In love with someone else. Well. He knew that already, really, and he should have known it from the beginning. What did he have to offer someone like Alex?

His hand felt like it was made out of wood. He separated himself from Alexander and Alexander didn’t even blink.

“The downside,” Jefferson said, not looking like he thought it was a downside at all, “is that loverboy has _definitely_ deduced fuckboy’s secret identity.”

Angelica rolled her eyes. “How much time did you spend outside thinking of that?”

“These things just come to me out of the ether, darlin’,” Jefferson said. “Anyway, it didn’t take him long.” He directed the rest at Alex, and his gaze was glittering, gem-hard. “Apparently, he had your blog bookmarked before and _everything_. It touches the heart. He’s all excited, the little star-fucker.”

“I don’t actually like you,” Alex said, almost thoughtfully, like he’d weighed the decision and come to it very carefully. “I mean, you just brought me the best good news, and I’m sitting here thinking what an unbelievable asshole you are.”

“Aww, your opinion cuts me right to the core. If this many people can put together the puzzle, we gotta disappear one of the pieces. The Twitter account goes. _Adieu au revoir_ , at-Publius,” and it took Burr a second to realize that Jefferson was pronouncing the @ symbol, and he felt an almost uncontrollable desire to laugh and had to press his fist against his mouth. “Mads will take it over for a few weeks and taper it off for you.”

“Why can’t I taper it off myself?” Alex said, lifting his chin. “Assuming I even agree with you that it has to go.”

“Oh, you mean, why don’t we, the people you 911-ed because you almost got boyfriend one of two sleeping with the fishes, trust you, noted unreliable liar, with the Twitter account you’re not supposed to have? Because it is, inexplicably, our job to keep you alive.”

“Only until the trial,” Alex said.

“Hamilton,” Angelica said.

He didn’t even look at her. “I mean, that’s true, right? Your job is to protect me _until the trial_.”

“Our _job_ ,” Burr said lowly, “is to protect you. Period. It doesn’t go away.” _Forever_ was the word that was flitting around his head, but he refused to catch it. Words like that were too dangerous to say.

“If I walk after the trial, if I leave the program, that doesn’t hurt anyone but me.”

“It’s just barely possible,” Angelica said, “that you aren’t the best judge of what hurts people who aren’t you. Isn’t it?”

That landed: he seemed to try to shake it off, like it was a mosquito that had just bitten him on the cheek, something he could knock away by shaking his head, but Burr knew that look from the inside-out. Hamilton’s lips had gone white in places, pressed hard against his teeth. Madison stepped in, voice level as always. “It’s true, of course, that you shouldn’t make any major decisions at the moment. Thomas has this effect on people. But any rational train of thought would suggest that your account, at the moment, would be better off in the hands of someone who could imitate your style while still diverging from it, and perhaps making the occasional dissenting point.”

“Dissent with myself?”

“With your previous identity.”

“My real identity.”

“If you like,” Madison said.

“I do not ‘ _have this effect on people_ ,’” Jefferson said.

“My suggestion,” Madison said, “would be that you write a book, which, in any case, publishing cycles being what they are, wouldn’t be available until after the trial anyway, and you’ve never done long-form journalism—it wouldn’t invite immediate comparisons.”

“He’s not allowed to do that,” Angelica said.

Madison offered them all a surprisingly charming sideways smile. “We can’t seem to stop him.”

“Traitor,” Jefferson said to him. “Take over the account, taper it off, make him rah-rah small government, send his ass packing, and don’t bond with Burr’s jackass witness. Also, Burr.” He snapped his fingers twice. “Quiet even for you. You want to weigh in on any of this?”

“Burr?” Alex said.

Burr stood up. He brushed the wrinkles out of his pants legs. “Write your book, Alexander.”

Alex looked at him for a moment, expression unreadable, and then he said, “Fine,” and directed that at Jefferson. “But I want to talk to John.”

“You’re in luck there,” Jefferson said, “because John wants to talk to you, too. We’ve already got him booked on an international flight connecting out of Miami to, well, you don’t really need all the details, do you? I don’t have to give you directions to where to find trouble. He’s agreed—though I’ll give you the kid was hard to persuade—to get out of the way until trouble dies down. Oh, he says, anything for ‘Alexander Hamilton.’”

“Good thing he’s used to all the sexting,” Angelica said. “It’s a long dry spell otherwise, waiting for George King to stop caring that you’re putting him in prison.” She shot a quick look at Burr, as if she wanted him to recognize that she had scored a point for him off John Laurens, that he’d only had over the phone what Burr had had up close and in person, that Burr knew the slightly grainy texture of the chapped skin on Alexander’s left wrist and the way he opened his mouth a little too wide, a little too impatiently, when they kissed. Did that matter? Alex had said it himself: he’d been choosing John Laurens. Had chosen John Laurens. Which meant that whatever disembodied thing they’d had was real, and Burr was—not. Was there but not real. Alex had used him to jerk off to Laurens, really.

 _Awesome_ , as Alex sometimes flatly said. _Wow._

“It’s safe,” Jefferson said.

Madison raised his eyebrows. “The sex? I should think so.”

“I’m consoling Burr. It’s safe. All the boy knows is he’s talking into a phone held by a US Marshal, and that’s fine, it’s no secret that Hammy here’s in the program. Seems like you live a charmed life, Hamilton.”

But Burr remembered Alexander answering the door on that second morning of theirs, running on fumes and panic, his hair lank against his cheeks, the color drained out of his face; Alexander walking through a bustling Costco with his shoulders almost up around his ears, drinking water to wash the metallic taste of pointless adrenaline out of his mouth, flinching anytime a cart knocked against a display; Alexander saying that he’d grown up in a food desert. No one went through life unscathed. Jefferson was just satisfied with the shallowest of explanations.

“If I lived a charmed life,” Alex said, “I wouldn’t be Hamilton, would I?” He held out his hand for the phone. “Let me talk to John.”

“Oh, bless your heart,” Jefferson said, in his best Southern _fuck-you_ voice. “We all just live to do your bidding, don’t we?”

But he dialed and held out the phone. Burr thought, for just a moment, that Jefferson would make eye contact with him— _I’m consoling Burr_ —before handing it over, but he didn’t. Angelica was suddenly next to him, though, her body poised against his, shoulder to shoulder and hipbone to hipbone, as if she would have checked his pulse if she could have. If he’d had any sense at all, he’d have fallen for her instead. For a moment, he could feel her like a fork of a tree in his chest, some place where he had diverged, and he moved away from her, created a draft between them, a sudden coolness on his skin, and severed the branch. She turned her head, just a little, to look at him.

“John? Oh, John, _gracias a Dios_ , John, I thought you were dead.” He listened for just a second and then laughed. He had that unlovely beauty to him again, with tears on his eyelashes and snot underneath his nose. Burr must have made him laugh once, right? Once or twice at least. But already Alex had laughed again. “Well, I wasn’t _allowed_ to tell you.” He tucked the phone under his chin, like they were all just palling around, and said to the room, “He wants to know when I started caring about rules all of a sudden.”

“Hamilton,” Madison said, “talk less.”

A little of the light went out of Alex’s eyes and Burr hated himself for being glad of it. He moved the phone back. “Sorry, sorry. Where are you going? No, I can know about you.”

Jefferson’s mouth tightened.

“God, I love hearing you say my name. I love _you_. We’ll meet up there, okay? When all of this is done?” He didn’t make eye contact with anyone this time. “Things will be easier after the trial.”

Not—at least—throwing his protection away entirely. If Alex left the country for a while after he testified against George King, would Burr have to go with him? Would he walk down some little side-street in London fifty feet behind them, eyes alert so he didn’t miss another tail, having in the meantime to see the way Alex would tuck his hand into John’s coat pocket for warmth? Focusing on the rounded pressure of the cobblestone underneath his shoe as they leaned in to kiss? Even Jefferson wouldn’t make him do that. But could he send Alex spinning out untethered into space? Could he wait—a week, a month, a year—to see if Alex would come back alive? Fuck. He had enough of that with Theo.

“No, I know. I know.”

“Scintillating,” Jefferson said.

“You do get one or two complete and utter assholes,” Alex said, a sort of froth of bitter exuberance in his voice, his eyeline hard and definite now, “but no, don’t worry about me. I mean, _I’m_ not the one who got grabbed. I should be worrying about _you_. They didn’t hurt you?”

No, Burr thought, Jefferson would have mentioned that, but Alex didn’t know that, and might not believe it even if he did. John gave him the good news, though, because Alex’s smile was back, and he wiped a tearstain off his face with the back of his hand, showing his lifeline briefly to Burr. Burr had traced every line in his palm, as if recalling the mehndi on Theodosia’s hands at their wedding. He’d wanted, maybe, to save Alex from himself, to save him with exactly the same little domestic rituals, the same lines of sage and salt, of farmer’s markets and canvas grocery totes, that had not saved his wife. A do-over.

 _I’m sorry_ , he thought, suddenly, to Theodosia. _I didn’t know how to fall in love with anyone else, I suppose._

Jefferson spun his finger in the air, a wheel rolling relentlessly onward, and pointed to his watch. “Flight time.”

“I’m getting waved at,” Alex said. “You’re on your way out? You’ll be careful? --Yeah. Baby, of course, yeah.”

Jefferson held out his hand for the phone, mimicking Alex’s gesture from before, down to the last crooked finger beckoning it in. “Don’t hang up,” he said. “Gotta give your man some precautions before we send him out into the wide world, what with the target on his back and all.”

“I love you,” Alex said, and Burr saw the utter lack of self-consciousness there. Alexander’s audience had disappeared, the spotlight had gone off, and he and John Laurens were alone in the dark. Burr couldn’t follow them anywhere. They would disappear into each other; they’d make a privacy no one else could touch. No wonder Alexander loved Laurens, for giving him that, this untouched spot of his life that was all his own. “I love you so much, I’m so glad you know. Be safe, okay, baby? I love you.”

He handed the phone to Jefferson, his fingers uncurling only at the last possible moment. Angelica touched Burr’s back just between the shoulder blades and he did not move away.

He could learn to live with this. Alexander had made his choice, and they all knew it, and that was fine, that was survivable. Burr hadn’t known, before, that he’d been getting the leftovers and scraps of Alex’s attention, the caul of fat trimmed from the beef, the microwaved remains of whatever was left of his passion after he’d pumped the rest of it into the palm of his hand, whatever words he had not said to his John, but he knew that now, he could see it, in the impatience of their second encounter, the way Alex had moved over him like enough friction between them would erase Burr’s body and give him someone else’s instead.

And—this couldn’t be forgotten—he’d put Alex in a difficult position. Had asked him an unanswerable question. _Surrender all your privacy, give me everything._

He saw clearly now that he’d demanded everything when he’d meant to demand nothing. He’d thought he was offering himself, that was all. But it had been more than that.

 _Admit everything,_ Alex had heard, _or else admit me._

“Yeah, hands off his Twitter,” Jefferson was saying, “someone else is taking it over. You can keep up yours—don’t act too normal, they know they nabbed you, so acting normal is acting suspicious, but, you know, rant about organized crime as a tool of the oppressive government working to silence free speech, hop on that train and ride it for a while. –I don’t care. Your play is you’re angry, you’ve been inconvenienced, you’ve been scared. Buy a Method acting book and read it on the damn plane for all I care.”

Madison snorted a little but Jefferson didn’t turn to grin at him.

“Actually,” Jefferson said, “ _actually_ , let me do you a big favor there. Let me be of some assistance to you, ‘cause I live to help. Let me give you your motivation.”

Burr looked up.

“Your boyfriend, sorry to say, has been getting a little honey on the side.”

“No,” Alex said. He stood, but Angelica was gone from Burr’s side and had interposed herself between Alex and the rest of them. Her face was impassive— _this is what you did, and this is what you get, this is fair_ —and Alex was held by that look as much as he was by the rest of her. And Burr?

Burr didn’t know what he wanted.

“Oh, yeah,” Jefferson said. “With a friend of mine. Another guy, I don’t know, I don’t know what kind of deal y’all had worked out, if that matters any, but yeah, a guy, good-looking, too.” He studied Burr, but he wasn’t seeing Burr at all, he never saw anyone when his eyes were like that: he was seeing Burr’s face painted across the hood of a pawn on some chessboard in his own mind. One more piece he could move. “Like you’d use him to sell upscale watches or those Burberry raincoats, that kind of face. Now, to be fair, and God forbid we not be fair, it seems like they never quite got around to the dicking, but you got to wonder what all’s included in the space between did and didn’t. You can think about that on your plane ride, too. You have a good day now, Mr. Laurens.”

Click. The phone went back in his pocket.

“I’m not convinced that was necessary,” Madison said.

Jefferson rolled his shoulders back. “I don’t know. Felt pretty good.”

Alex licked his lips, just a little, and he was gray-faced now, not beautiful at all. “You hurt him just to hurt me.”

“Hey, I got no satisfaction witnessing your fits of passion. And you think back on your timeline a little and maybe you’ll figure out who really hurt whom,” and it was the _whom_ that made anger suddenly awaken in Burr, a hot lick of fire right through the center of him, because _fuck Jefferson, fuck him_ , for not even being flustered, for not even making a mistake. “I just unmasked you. You’re the one who went and decided what your face was going to look like. You’ve got your own phone back. Email him, tell him how sorry you are. I don’t know that it’ll work, he sounded all kinds of cut-up about it, but you can try. America belongs to those who try.”

“I’m walking,” Alex said. “After the trial, I’ll walk.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jefferson said, “if anything ever happened to you, I’d be just _devastated_.” He shrugged into his coat. “Mads, you can make sure he makes it home, since y’all have such a _rapport_ going on now. Angie, Burr, outside.”

“Burr?” Alex was looking at him then, but all Burr could think was that he didn’t want to be Alex’s second choice, his back-up chute for when things went wrong. Burr didn’t want to live half a life—he’d done that for too long already.

So he only nodded, aware that it could be taken for anything, and he left Alexander like that and followed Angelica and Jefferson outside into what he was aware was the cold, though it felt the same as the room he’d just left. They walked along a little while, almost to the car, and then Angelica touched his arm and Burr turned towards Jefferson like he was a stone flung out of a slingshot, a cocked gun with her hand to pull the trigger, and he said, “That was gratuitous.” And then, because that sounded fussy, decorous— _like you’d use him to sell upscale watches_ —he said, “Cruel,” and cruel was what he meant, sadistic was what he meant, because he knew it from the inside-out, knew he’d taken his own unfair share of pleasure in it, in how Alex’s face had fallen, had felt that rise of viciousness in his throat even as he’d known that this fucked him, too, that this was his chance at walking away shredded without a second thought. He could handle having no chance. And now he had a chance again. He wanted to knock Jefferson, constantly unflustered Jefferson, down to the ground, he wanted to make a bloody mess of him.

“That was a _consequence_ ,” Jefferson said, “an equal and opposite reaction, and, by the way, Burr, here’s yours: step back and get that look out of your eyes before I make it worse. A month’s suspension, no-pay. My God. I should be firing you. The first thing you want in three years and it’s this? Maybe thirty days will help you get your shit together, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still thirty days I don’t have to look at you and pretend not to be disappointed. Oh, and there’s an Uber waiting for you around the way. No need for you to make the drive back to the office.”

“Hamilton said Burr didn’t—”

“Oh, hooray, he didn’t pressure him and he never actually fucked him, let’s all throw a party.”

“I thought you were on his side,” Angelica said.

Burr didn’t say anything. He’d said the only thing he could think of and all that remained, apparently, was to let them fight it out over him, gaining inches across the territory of his reputation.

“We done?” Jefferson said, opening the passenger side door for her.

“Not nearly,” she said, pushing it closed. “And I’ll ride with Burr.”

“Good,” he said approvingly. “Partners should stick together.”

But Burr moved away from her, stepping back as if she’d raised a hand to him. “I’ll go by myself,” he said, and every muscle in her face went absolutely still, not slack but simply motionless, and he realized she had looked that way when he had distanced himself from her in the storage unit, that she had looked at him like that a thousand times, that she took every inch he put between them and every non-answer and every unreturned text like a bruise and that she’d grown used to the novocaine. The worst thing her family had ever done to her was move away and ask her to smile; the worst thing Burr ever did to her he did to her all the time, as a matter of course.

 _I have never loved you more than in this moment_ , she had said, what he’d heard with the bright watery crunch of salad between his teeth, as he’d done just one thing back for her.

He saw all that now and he saw that he could have mended it if he had just stepped forward, let his face crack, wrap his arms around her, give comfort, take comfort, but—

“Just go with Jefferson,” he said. He was so tired. He was polite. “I don’t need any company right now, but I appreciate the offer.”

Angelica looked down at the ground and breathed in. When she exhaled, there was a slight frost in front of her face. He could feel the cold now, he realized, and so could she.

“Yeah,” she said tonelessly. She got in the car. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

*

Alex tried to think of the right words.


End file.
